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CHAPTER VII. 

LAST YEABS 165 



HAWTHORNE. 

CHAPTER I. 

EARLY YEARS. 

It will be necessary, for several reasons, to give this 
short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a 
biography. The data for a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne 
are the reverse of copious, and even if they were abundant 
they would serve but in a limited measure -the purpose of 
the biographer. Hawthorne's career was probably as tran- 
quil and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man 
of letters ; it was almost strikingly deficient in incident, 
in what may be called the dramatic quality. Few men of 
equal genius and of equal eminence can have led, on the 
whole, a simpler life. His six volumes of Note -Books 
illustrate this simplicity ; they are a sort of monument to 
an unagitated fortune. Hawthorne's career had vicissi- 
tudes or variations ; it was passed, for the most part, in a 
small and homogeneous society, in a provincial, rural com- 
munity ; it had few perceptible points of contact with 
what is called the world, with public events, with the man- 
ners of his time, even with the life of his neighbours. Its 
literary incidents are not numerous. He produced, in 
1* 



2 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

quantity, but little. His works consist of four novels and 
the fragment of another, five volumes of short tales, a col- 
lection of sketches, and a couple of story-books for chil- 
dren. And yet some account of the man and the writer 
is well worth giving. Whatever may have been Haw- 
thorne's private lot, he has the importance of being the 
most beautiful and most eminent representative of a litera- 
ture. The importance of the literature may be question- 
ed, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is 
the most valuable example of the American genius. That 
genius has not, as a whole, been literary ; but Hawthorne 
was on his limited scale a master of expression. He is 
the writer to whom his countrymen most confidently point 
when they wish to make a claim to have enriched the 
mother-tongue, and, judging from present appearances, he 
will long occupy this honourable position. If there is 
something very fortunate for him in the way that he bor- 
rows an added relief from the absence of competitors in 
his own line, and from the general flatness of the literary 
field that surrounds him, there is also, to a spectator, some- 
thing almost touching in his situation. He was so modest 
and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing 
from the lonely honour of a representative attitude — per- 
ceiving a painful incongruity between bis imponderable 
literary baggage and the large conditions of American life. 
Hawthorne, on the one side, is so subtle and slender and 
unpretending, and the American world, on the other, is so 
vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to the 
author of The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses from an Old 
Manse, that we render him a poor service in contrasting 
his proportions with those of a great civilization. But 
our author must accept the awkward as well as the grace- 
ful side of his fame ; for he has the advantage of pointing 



I.] EARLY YEARS. 3 

a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art 
blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great 
deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs 
a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. 
American civilization has hitherto had other things to do 
than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers 
it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for 
them to write about. Three or four beautiful plants of 
trans- Atlantic growth are the sum of w^hat the world usu- 
ally recognises, and in this modest nosegay the genius of 
Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest and sweetest 
fragrance. 

His very simplicity has been in his favour ; it has help- 
ed him to appear complete and homogeneous. To talk of 
his being national would be to force the note and make a 
mistake of proportion ; but he is, in spite of the absence 
of the realistic quality, intensely and vividly local. Out 
of the soil of New England he sprang — in a crevice of 
that immitigable granite he sprouted and bloomed. Half 
of the interest that he possesses for an American reader 
with any turn for analysis must reside in his latent New 
England savour ; and I think it no more than just to say 
that whatever entertainment he may yield to those who 
know him at a distance, it is an almost indispensable con- 
dition 'of properly appreciating him to have received a per- 
sonal impression of the manners, the morals, indeed of the 
very climate, of the great region of which the remarkable 
city of Boston is the metropolis. The cold, bright air of 
New England seems to blow through his pages, and these, 
in the opinion of many people, are the medium in which 
it is most agreeable to make the acquaintance of that tonic 
atmosphere. As to whether it is worth while to seek to 
know something of New England in order to extract a 



4 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

more intimate quality from The House of Seven Gables 
and The Blithedale Romance,! need not pronounce; but 
it is certain that a considerable observation of the society 
to which these productions were more directly addressed 
is a capital preparation for enjoying thern. I have alluded 
\ to the absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism 

\ which is now so much in fashion, an absence in regard to 
which there will of course be more to say ; and yet I think 
I am not fanciful in saying that he testifies to the senti- 
ments of the society in which he flourished almost as per- 
tinently (proportions observed) as Balzac and some of his 
descendants — MM. Flaubert and Zola — testify to the man- 
ners and morals of the French people. He was not a man 
with a literary theory ; he was guiltless of a system, and 
I am not sure that he had ever heard, of Realism, this 
remarkable compound having (although it was invented 
some time earlier) come into general use only since his 
death. He had certainly not proposed to himself to give 
an account of the social idiosyncrasies of his fellow-citizens, 
for his touch on such points is always light and vague, he 
has none of the apparatus of an historian, and his shadowy 
style of portraiture never suggests a rigid standard of ac- 
curacy. Nevertheless, he virtually offers the most vivid 
reflection of New England life that has found its way into 
literature. His value in this respect is not diminished by 
the fact that he has not attempted to portray the usual 
Yankee of comedy, and that he lias been almost culpably 
indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the 
variations of colloquial English that may be observed in 
the New World. His characters do not express them- 
selves in the dialect of the Biglow Papers — their language, 

^ indeed, is apt to be too elegant, too delicate. They are not 
portraits of actual types, and in their phraseology there is 



I.] EARLY YEARS. 5 

/nothing imitative. But none the less, Hawthorne's work 
savours thoroughly of the local soil — it is redolent of the 
social system in which he had his being. 

This could hardly fail to be the case, when the man 
himself was so deeply rooted in the soil. Hawthorne 
sprang from the primitive New England stock ; he had a 
veiy definite and conspicuous pedigree. He was born at 
Salem, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July, 1804, and his 
birthday was the great American festival, the anniver- 
sary of the Declaration of national Independence.^ Haw- 
thorne was in his disposition an unqualified and unflinch- 
ing American ; he found occasion to give us the meas- 
ure of the fact during the seven years that he spent in 
Europe towards the close of his life ; and this was no 
more than proper on the part of a man who had enjoyed 
the honour of coming into the world on the day on which 
of all the days in the year the great Republic enjoys her 
acutest fit of self-consciousness. Moreover, a person who 
has been ushered into life by the ringing of bells and the 
booming of cannon (unless indeed he be frightened straight 
out of it again by the uproar of his awakening) receives 
by this very fact an injunction to do something great, 
something that will justify such striking natal accompani- 

^ It is proper that before I go further I should acknowledge my 
large obligations to the only biography of our author, of any consid- 
erable length, that has been written — the little volume entitled A 
Study of Hawthorne, by Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, the son-in-law 
of the subject of the work. (Boston, 1876.) To this ingenious and 
sympathetic sketch, in which the author has taken great pains to 
collect the more interesting facts of Hawthorne's life, I am greatly 
indebted. Mr. Lathrop's work is not pitched in the key which many 
another writer would have chosen, and his tone is not to my sense 
the truly critical one; but without the help afforded by his elaborate 
essay the present little volume could not have beeii prepared. ' 



6 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

raents. Hawthorne was by race of the clearest Puritan 
strain. His earliest American ancestor (who wrote the 
name " Hathorne " — the shape in which it was transmit- 
ted to Nathaniel, who inserted the w) was the younger 
son of a Wiltshire family, whose residence, according to a 
note of our author's in 1837, was " Wigcastle, Wigton." 
Hawthorne, in the note in question, mentions the gentle- 
man who was at that time the head of the family ; but it 
does not appear that he at any period renewed acquaint- 
ance with his English kinsfolk. Major William Ha- 
thorne came out to Massachusetts in the early years of 
the Puritan settlement; in 1635 or 1636, according to 
the note to which I have just alluded; in 1630, according 
to information presumably more accurate. He was one 
of the band of companions of the virtuous and exemplary 
John Winthrop, the almost lifelong royal Governor of the 
young colony, and the brightest and most amiable figure 
in the early Puritan annals. How amiable William Ha- 
thorne may have been I know not, but he was evidently 
of the stuff of which the citizens of the Commonwealth 
were best advised to be made. He was a sturdy fighting 
man, doing solid execution upon both the inward and out- 
ward enemies of the State. The latter were the savages, 
the former the Quakers ; the energy expended by the 
early Puritans in resistance, to the tomahawk not weaken- 
ing their disposition to deal with spiritual dangers. They 
employed the same — or almost the same — weapons in 
both directions ; the flintlock and the halberd against the 
Indians, and the cat-o'-nine-tails against the heretics. One 
of the longest, though by no means one of the most suc- 
cessful, of Hawthorne's shorter tales {The Gentle Boy) 
deals with this pitiful persecution of the least aggressive 
of all schismatic bodies. William Hathorne, who had been 



1.] EARLY YEARS. Y 

made a magistrate of the town of Salem, where a grant of 
land had been offered him as an inducement to residence, 
figures in New England history as having given orders 
that " Anne Coleman and four of her friends " should be 
whipped through Salem, Boston, and Dedham. This Anne 
Coleman, I suppose, is the woman alluded to in that fine 
passage in the Introduction to The Scarlet Letter^ in which 
Hawthorne pays a qualified tribute to the founder of the 
American branch of his race. 

" The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tra- 
dition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my 
boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still 
haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, 
which I scarcely claim in reference to the present, phase of 
the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence 
here on account of this grave, bearded, sable - cloaked and 
steeple-crowned progenitor — wiio came so early, with his 
Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with such 
a stately port, and made so large a fi!gure as a man of war 
and peace — a stronger claim than for myself, wiiose name is 
seldom heard and my face hardly knowm. He w^as a soldier, 
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the church; he had all 
the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a 
bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have remem- 
bered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his 
hard severity towards a woman of their sect which will last 
longer, it is to be feared, than any of his better deeds, though 
these were many," 

William Hathorne died in 1681 ; but those hard quali- 
ties that his descendant speaks of were reproduced in his 
son John, who bore the title of Colonel, and who was con- 
nected, too intimately for his honour, with that deplorable 
episode of New England history, the persecution of the 



8 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

so-called Witches of Salem. John Hathorne is introduced 
into the little drama entitled The Salem Farms, in Long- 
fellow's New England Tragedies. I know not whether 
he had the compensating merits of his father, but our au- 
thor speaks of him, in the continuation of the passage I 
have just quoted, as having made himself so conspicuous 
in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may be 
said to have left a stain upon him. "So deep a stain, 
indeed," Hawthorne adds, characteristically, " that his old 
dry bones in the Charter Street burial-ground must still 
retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust." 
Readers of The House of the Seven Gables will remember 
that the story concerns itself with a family which is sup- 
posed to be overshadowed by a curse launched against one 
of its earlier members by a poor man occupying a lowlier 
place in the w^orld, whom this ill-advised ancestor had been 
the means of bringing to justice for the crime of witch- 
craft. Hawthorne apparently found the idea of the his- 
tory of the Pyncheons in his own family annals. His 
witch -judging ancestor was reported to have incurred a 
malediction from one of his victims, in consequence of 
which the prosperity of the race faded utterly away. " I 
know not," the passage I have already quoted goes on, 
" whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to 
repent and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties, or 
whether they are now groaning under the heavy conse- 
quences of them in another state of being. At all events, 
I, the present writer, hereby take shame upon myself for 
their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them — as 
I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condi- 
tion of the race for some time back would argue to exist 
— may be now and henceforth removed." The two first 
American Hathornes had been people of importance and 



I.] EAKLY YEARS. 9 

responsibility; but with the third generation the family 
lapsed into an obscurity from, which it emerged in the 
very person of the writer, who begs so gracefully for a turn 
in its aJBEairs. It is veiy true, Hawthorne proceeds, in the 
Introduction to The Scai'let Letter, that from the originar 
point of view such lustre as he might have contrived to 
confer upon the name would have appeared more than 
questionable. 

" Either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would 
have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that 
after so long a lapse of years the old trunk of the fami- 
ly tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have 
borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim 
that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; 
no success of mine, if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had 
ever been brightened by success, would they deem otherwise 
than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. ' What is he V 
murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. 
'A writer of story-books ! What kind of a business in life, 
what manner of glorifying God,* or being serviceable to man- 
kind in his day and generation, may that be ? Why, the 
degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler !' Such 
are the compliments bandied between my great -grandsires 
and myself across the gulf of time ! And yet, let them scorn 
me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined 
themselves with mine." 

In this last observation we may imagine that there was 
not a little truth. Poet and novelist as Hawthorne was, 
sceptic and dreamer and little of a man of action, late- 
comino; fruit of a tree which mio-ht seem to have lost the 
power to bloom, he was morally, in an appreciative degree, 
a chip of the old block. His forefathers had crossed the 
Atlantic for conscience' sake, and it was the idea of the 



10 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

urgent conscience that haunted the imagination of their 
so-called degenerate successor. The Puritan strain in his 
blood ran clear — there are passages in his Diaries, kept 
during his residence in Europe, which might almost have 
been written by the grimmest of the old Salem worthies. 
To him as to them, the consciousness of sin was the most 
importunate fact of life ; and if they had undertaken to 
write little tales, this baleful substantive, with its attendant 
adjective, could hardly have been more frequent in their 
pages than in those of their fanciful descendant. Haw- 
thorne had, moreover, in his composition, contemplator and 
dreamer as he was, an element of simplicity and rigidity, 
a something plain and masculine and sensible, which might 
have kept his black -browed grandsires on better terms 
with him than he admits to be possible. However little 
they might have appreciated the artist, they would have 
approved of the man. . The play Of Hawthorne's intellect 
was light ?md capricious, but the man himself was firm and 
rational. The imagination was profane, but the temper 
was not degenerate. 

The "dreary and unprosperous condition" that he 
speaks of in regard to the fortunes of his family is an 
allusion to the fact that several generations followed each 
other on the soil in which they had been planted, that 
during the eighteenth century a succession of Hathornes 
trod the simple streets of Salem without ever conferring 
any especial lustre upon the town or receiving, presum- 
ably, any great delight from it. A hundred years of 
Salem would perhaps be rather a dead -weight for any 
family to carry, and we venture to imagine that the Ha- 
thornes were dull and depressed. They did what they 
could, however, to improve their situation ; they trod the 
Salem streets as little as possible. They went to sea, and 



I.] . EARLY YEARS. 11 

made long voyages ; seamanship became the regular pro- 
fession of the family. Hawthorne has said it in charm- 
ino; lanajuao'e, " From father to son, for above a hundred 
years, they followed the sea ; a grey-headed shipmaster, in 
each generation, retiring from the quarter - deck to the 
homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary 
place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the 
gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. 
The boy also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to 
the cabin, spent a tempestuous -manhood, and returned 
from his world-wanderings to grow old and die, and min- 
gle his dust with the natal earth." Our author's grand- 
father, Daniel Hathorne, is mentioned by Mr. Lathrop, his 
biographer and son-in-law, as a hardy privateer during 
the war of Independence. His father, from whom he was 
named, was also a shipmaster, and he died in foreign lands, 
in the 'exercise of his profession. He was carried off by 
a fever, at Surinam, in 1808. He left three children, of 
whom Nathaniel was the only boy. The boy's mother, 
who had been a Miss Manning, came of a New England 
stock almost as long established as that of her husband ; 
she is described by our author's biographer as a woman 
of remarkable beauty, and by an authority whom he 
quotes, as being " a minute observer of religious festivals," 
of " feasts, fasts, new - moons, and Sabbaths." Of feasts 
the poor lady in her Puritanic home can have had but a 
very limited number to celebrate ; but of new-moons she 
^ may be supposed to have enjoj^ed the usual, and of Sab- 
baths even more than the usual, proportion. 

In quiet provincial Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne passed 
the greater part of his boyhood, as well as many years of' 
his later life. Mr. Lathrop has much to say about the an- 
cient picturesqueness of the place, and about the ipvstic 
B 



12 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

influences it would project upon such a mind and charac- 
ter as Hawthorne's. These things are always relative, and 
in appreciating them everything depends upon the point 
of view. Mr. Lathrop writes for American readers, who in 
such a matter as this are very easy to please. Americans 
have, as a general thing, a hungry passion for the pictu- 
resque, and they are so fond of local colour that they con- 
trive to perceive it in localities in which the amateurs of 
other countries would detect only the most neutral tints. 
History, as yet, has left in the United States but so thin 
and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the 
hard substratum of nature ; and nature herself, in the West- 
ern World, has the peculiarity of seeming rather crude and 
immature. The very air looks new and young ; the light 
of the sun seems fresh and innocent, as if it knew as yet 
but few of the secrets of the world and none of the weari- 
ness of shining; the vegetation has the appearance of not 
having reached its majority. A large juvenility is stamped 
upon the face of things, and in the vividness of the pres- 
ent, the past, which died so young and had time to pro- 
duce so little, attracts but scanty attention. I doubt 
whether English observers would discover any very strik- 
ing trace of it in the ancient town of Salem. Still, with 
all respect to a York and a Shrewsbury, to a Toledo and a 
Verona, Salem has a physiognomy in which the past plays 
a more important part than the present. It is of course a 
very recent past ; but one must remember that the dead 
of yesterday are not more alive than those of a century 
ago. I know not of what picturesqueness Hawthorne was 
conscious in his respectable birthplace ; I suspect his per- 
ception of it was less keen than his biographer assumes it 
to have been ; but he must have felt at least that, of what- 
ever complexity of earlier life there had been in the coun- 



I.] EARLY YEARS. 13 

try, the elm-shadowed streets of Salem were a recognisa- 
ble memento. He has made considerable mention of the 
place, here and there, in his tales ; but he has nowhere di- 
lated upon it very lovingly, and it is noteworthy that in 
The House of the Seven Gables, the only one of his novels 
of which the scene is laid in it, he has by no means availed 
himself of the opportunity to give a description of it. 
He had of course a filial fondness for it — a deep-seated 
sense of connection with it ; but he must have spent some 
very dreary years there, and the two feelings, the mingled 
tenderness and rancour, are visible in the Introduction to 
The Scarlet Letter. 

" The old towm of Salem," he writes — " my native place, 
though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood 
and in maturer years — possesses, or did possess, a hold on my 
affections, the force of which I have never realized during 
my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as the 
physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, 
covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which 
pretend to architectural beauty ; its irregularity, which is 
neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame ; its long and 
lazy street, lounging wearisomely 'through the whole extent 
of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one 
end, and a view of the almshouse at the other — such being 
the features of my native town, it would be quite as rea- 
sonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged 
chequer-board." 

But he goes on to say that he has never divested him- 
self of the sense of intensely belonging to it — that the 
spell of the continuity of his life with that of his prede- 
cessors has never been broken. " It is no matter that 
the place is joyless for him ; that he is weary of the old 
wooden houses, the mud and the dust, the dead level of 



14 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chilliest of 
social atmosphere ; — all these, and whatever faults besides 
he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The 
spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot 
were an earthly paradise." There is a very American 
quality in this perpetual consciousness of a spell on Haw- 
thorne's part ; it is only in a country where newness and 
change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of 
life, that the fact of one's ancestors having lived for a hun- 
dred and seventy years in a single spot would become an 
element of one's morality. It is only an imaginative 
American that would feel urged to keep reverting to this 
circumstance, to keep analysing and cunningly consider- 
ing it. 

The Salem of to - day has, as New England towns go, 
a physiognomy of its own, and in spite of Hawthorne's 
analogy of the disarranged draught-board, it is a decidedly 
agreeable one. The spreading elms in its streets ; the pro- 
portion of large, square, honourable - looking houses, sug- 
gesting an easy, copious material life ; the little gardens ; 
the grassy waysides ; the open windows ; the air of space 
and salubrity and decency ; and above all the intimation of 
larger antecedents — these things compose a picture which 
has little of the element that painters call depth of tone, 
but which is not without something that they would ad- 
mit to be style. To English eyes the oldest and most 
honourable of the smaller American towns must seem in 
a manner primitive and rustic ; the shabby, straggling, 
village- quality appears marked in them, and their social 
tone is not unnaturally inferred to bear the village stamp. 
Village-like they are, and it would be no gross incivility to 
describe them as large, respectable, prosperous, democratic 
villages. But even a village, in a great and vigorous 



I.] EARLY YEARS. 15 

democracy, where there are no overshadowing squires, 
where the " county " has no social existence, where the 
villagers are conscious of no superincumbent strata of 
gentility, piled upwards into vague regions of privilege — 
even a village is not an institution to accept of more or 
less graceful patronage ; it thinks extremely well of itself, 
and is absolute in its own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but 
it is a sea-port deserted and decayed. It belongs to that 
rather melancholy group of old coast-towns scattered along 
the great sea-face of New England, and of which the list 
is completed by the names of Portsmouth, Plymouth, New 
Bedford, Newburyport, Newport — superannuated centres 
of the traffic with foreign lands, which have seen their 
trade carried away from them by the greater cities. As 
Hawthorne says, their ventures have gone " to swell, need- 
lessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at 
New York or Boston." Salem, at the beginning of the 
present century, played a great part in the Eastern trade ; 
it was the residence of enterprising shipowners who de- 
spatched their vessels to Indian and Chinese seas. It was 
a place of large fortunes, many of which have remain- 
ed, though the activity that produced them has passed 
away. These successful traders constituted what Haw- 
thorne calls " the aristocratic class." He alludes in one 
of his slighter sketches {The Sister Yearn) to the sway 
of this class, and the " moral influence of wealth " having 
been more marked in Salem than in any other New Eng- 
land town. The sway, we may believe, was on the whole 
gently exercised, and the moral influence of wealth was 
not exerted in the cause of immorality. Hawthorne was 
probably but imperfectly conscious of an advantage which 
familiarity had made stale — the fact that he lived in the 
most democratic and most virtuous of modern communi- 



16 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

ties. Of the virtue it is but civil to suppose that his own 
family had a liberal share ; but not much of the wealth, 
apparently, came into their way. Hawthorne was not born 
to a patrimony, and his income, later in life, never exceed- 
ed very modest proportions. 

Of his childish years there appears to be nothing very 
definite to relate, though his biographer devotes a good 
many graceful pages to them. There is a considerable 
sameness in the behaviour of small boys, and it is prob- 
able that if we were acquainted with the details of our 
author's infantine career we should find it to be made up 
. of the same pleasures and pains as that of many ingenuous 
lads for whom fame has had nothing in keeping. 

The absence of precocious symptoms of genius is, on 
the whole, more striking in the lives of men who have 
distinguished themselves than their juvenile promise ; 
though it must be added that Mr. Lathrop has made out, 
as he was almost in duty bound to do, a very good case in 
favour of Hawthorne's having been an interesting child. 
He was not at any time what would be called a sociable 
man, and there is therefore nothing unexpected in the fact 
that he was fond of long walks in which he was not 
known to have had a companion. " Juvenile literature " 
was but scantily known at that time, and the enormous 
and extraordinary contribution made by the United States 
to this department of human happiness was locked in the 
bosom of futurity. The young Hawthorne, therefore, like 
many of his contemporaries, was constrained to amuse 
himself, for want of anything better, with the Pilgrirn's 
Progress and the Faery Queen. A boy may have worse 
company than Bunyan and Spenser, and it is very proba- 
ble that in his childish rambles our author may have had 
associates of whom there could be no record. When he 



I.] EARLY YEARS. 17 

was nine years old, he met with an accident at school 
which threatened for awhile to have serious results. He 
was struck on the foot by a ball, and so severely lamed 
that he was kept at home for a long time, and had not 
completely recovered before his twelfth year. His school, 
it is to be supposed, was the common day-school of New 
England — the primary factor in that extraordinarily per- 
vasive system of instruction in the plainer branches of 
learning which forms one of the principal ornaments of 
American life. In 1818, when he was fourteen years old, 
he was taken by his mother to live in the house of an 
uncle, her brother, who was established in the town of 
Raymond, near Lake Sebago, in the State of Maine. The 
immense State of Maine, in the year 1818, must have had 
an even more magnificently natural character than it pos- 
sesses at the present day, and the uncle's dwelling, in con- 
sequence of being in a little smarter style than the primi- 
tive structures that surrounded it, was known by the vil- 
lagers as Manning's Folly. Mr. Lathrop pronounces this 
region to be of a " weird and woodsy " character ; and 
Hawthorne, later in life, spoke of it to a friend as the 
place where " I first got my cursed habits of solitude." 
The outlook, indeed, for an embryonic novelist, would not 
seem to have been cheerful ; the social dreariness of a 
small New England community lost amid the forests *of 
Maine, at the beginning of the present century, must have 
been consummate. But for a boy with a relish for soli- 
tude there were many natural resources, and we can under- 
stand that Hawthorne should in after-years have spoken 
very tenderly of this episode. " I lived in Maine like a 
bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." 
During the long summer days he roamed, gun in hand, 
through the great woods ; and during the moonlight nights 
2 



18 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

of winter, says his biographer, quoting another informant, 
" he would skate until midnight, all alone, upon Sebago 
Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either 
Land." 

In 1819 he was sent back to Salem to school; and in 
the following year he wrote to his mother, who had re- 
mained at Raymond (the boy had found a home at Salem 
with another uncle), " I have left school, and have begun 
to fit for college under Benjm. L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you 
are in danger of having one learned man in your fam- 
ily. ... I get my lessons at home, and recite them to him 
(Mr. Oliver) at seven o'clock in the morning. . . . Shall you 
want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A Minis- 
ter I will not be." He adds, at the close of this epistle — 
" how I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do 
but to go a-gunning ! But the happiest days of my life 
are gone." In 1821, in his seventeenth year, he entered 
Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine. This institution, 
was in the year 1821 — a quarter of a century after its 
foundation — a highly honourable, but not a very elab- 
orately organized, nor a particularly impressive, seat of 
learning. I say it was not impressive, but I immediately 
remember that impressions depend upon the minds receiv- 
ing them ; and that to a group of simple New England 
lads, upwards of sixty years ago, the halls and groves of 
Bowdoin, neither dense nor lofty though they can have 
been, may have seemed replete with Academic stateliness. 
It was a homely, simple, frugal, "country college," of the 
old-fashioned American stamp ; exerting within its limits 
a civilizing influence, working, amid the forests and the 
lakes, the log-houses and the clearings, toward the ameni- 
ties and humanities and other collegiate graces, and offer- 
ing a very sufficient education to the future lawyers, mer- 



l] early years. 19 

chants, clergymen, politicians, and editors, of the very act- 
ive and knowledge -loving community that supported it. 
It did more than this* — it numbered poets and statesmen 
among its undergraduates, and on the roll-call of its sons it 
has several distinguished names. Among Hawthorne's fel- 
low-students was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who di- 
vides with our author the honour of being the most distin- 
guished of American men of letters. I know not whether 
Mr. Longfellow was especially intimate with Hawthoi-ne at 
this period (they were very good friends later in life), but 
with two of his companions he formed a friendship which 
lasted always. One of these was Franklin Pierce, who was 
destined to fill what Hawthorne calls "the most august po- 
sition in the world." Pierce was elected President of the 
United States in 1852. The other was Horatio Bridge, 
who afterwards served with distinction in the navy, and 
to whom the charming prefatory letter of the collection of 
tales published under the name of The Snow Image is 
addressed. " If anybody is responsible at this day for my 
being an author, it is yourself. I know not whence your 
faith came ; but while we were lads together at a country 
college — gathering blueberries in study-hours under those 
tall Academic pines ; or watching the great logs as they 
tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin ; or shoot- 
ing pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods ; or bat-fowl- 
ing in the summer twilight ; or catching trout in that 
shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering 
riverward through the forest — though you and I will never 
cast a line in it again — two idle lads, in short (as we need 
not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things the 
Faculty never heard of, or else it had been worse for us — 
still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he 
was to be a writer of fiction." That is a very pretty pict- 



20 HAWTHOKNE. [chap. 

ure, but it is a picture of happy urchins at school, rather 
than of undergraduates "panting," as Macaulay says "for 
one-and-twenty." Poor Hawthorne* was indeed thousands 
of miles away from Oxford and Cambridge ; that touch 
about the blueberries and the logs on the Androscoggin 
tells the whole story, and strikes the note, as it were, of 
his circumstances. But if the pleasures at Bowdoin were 
not expensive, so neither were the penalties. The amount 
of Hawthorne's collegiate bill for one term was less than 
4/., and of this sum more than 9s. was made up of fines. 
The fines, however, were not heavy. Mr. Lathrbp prints a 
letter addressed by the President to " Mrs. Elizabeth C. 
Hathorne," requesting her co-operation with the officers 
of this college " in the attempt to induce your son faith- 
fully to observe the laws of this institution." He had just 
been fined fifty cents for playing cards for money during 
the preceding term. " Perhaps he might not have gamed," 
the President adds, " were it not for the influence of a stu- 
dent whom we have dismissed from college." The biog- 
rapher quotes a letter from Hawthorne to one of his sis- 
ters, in which the writer says, in allusion to this remark, 
that it is a great mistake to think that he has been led 
away by the wicked ones. " I was fully as willing to play 
as the person he suspects of having enticed me, and would 
have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to 
commence playing again, merely to show him that I scorn 
to be seduced by another into anything wrong." There is 
something in these few words that accords with the im- 
pression- that the observant reader of Hawthorne gathers 
of the personal character that underlay his duskily-sportive 
imagination — an impression of simple manliness and trans- 
parent honesty. 

He appears to have b'.en a fair scholar, but not a brill- 



1.] EARLY YEARS. 21 

iant one ; and it is very probable that, as the standard of 
scholarship at Bowdoin was not high, he graduated none 
the less comfortably on this account. Mr. Lathrop is able 
to testify to the fact, by no means a surprising one, that 
he wrote verses at college, though the few stanzas that the 
biographer quotes are not such as to make us especially 
regret that his rhyming mood was a transient one. 

" The ocean hath its silent caves, 
Deep, quiet and alone. 
Though there be fury on the waves. 
Beneath them there is none." 

That quatrain may suffice to decorate our page. And in 
connection with his college days, I may mention his first 
novel, a short romance entitled Fanshawe, which was pub- ■ 
lished in Boston in 1828, three years after he graduated. 
It was probably also written after that event, but the scene 
of the tale is laid at Bowdoin (which figures under an al- 
tered name) ; and Hawthorne's attitude with regard to the 
book, even shortly after it was published, was such as to 
assign it to this boyish period. It was issued anonymous- 
ly ; but he so repented of his venture that he annihilated 
the edition, of which, according to Mr. Lathrop, " not half 
a dozen copies are now known to be extant." I have seen 
none of these rare volumes, and I know nothing of Fan- 
shawe but what the writer just quoted relates. It is the 
story of a young lady who goes in rather an odd fashion 
to reside at " Harley College " (equivalent of Bowdoin), 
under the care and guardianship of Dr. Mel moth, the Pres- 
ident of the institution, a venerable, amiable, unworldly, 
and henpecked scholar. Here she becomes, very naturally, 
an object of interest to two of the students ; in regard to 
whom I cannot do better than quote Mr. Lathrop. One 



22 HAWTHORNE.' [chap. 

of these young men "is Edward Wolcott, a wealthy, hand- 
some, generous, healthy young fellow from one of the sea- 
port towns ; and the other, Fanshawe the hero, who is a 
poor but ambitious recluse, already passing into a decline 
through overmuch devotion to books and meditation. 
Fanshawe, though the deeper nature of the two, and in- 
tensely moved by his new passion, perceiving that a union 
between himself and Ellen could not be a happy one, re- 
signs the hope of it from the beginning. But circum- 
stances bring him into intimate relation with her. The 
real action of the book, after the preliminaries, takes up 
only some three days, and turns upon the attempt of a 
man named Butler to entice Ellen away under his protec- 
tion, then marry her, and secure the fortune to which she 
is heiress. This scheme is partly frustrated by circum- 
stances, and Butler's purpose towards Ellen thus becomes 
a much more sinister one. From this she is rescued by 
Fanshawe ; and knowing that he loves her, but is conceal- 
ing his passion, she gives him the opportunity and the 
right to claim her hand. For a moment the rush of de- 
sire and hope is so great that he hesitates; then he refuses 
to take advantage of her generosity, and parts with her for 
a last time. Ellen becomes engaged to Wolcott, who had 
won her heart from the first ; and Fanshawe, sinking into 
rapid consumption, dies before his class graduates." The 
story must have had a good deal of innocent lightness ; 
and it is a proof of how little the world of observation 
lay open to Hawthorne at this time, that he should have 
had no other choice than to make his little drama go for- 
ward between the rather naked walls of Bowdoin, where 
the presence of his heroine was an essential incongruity. 
He was twenty-four years old, but the " world," in its so- 
cial sense, had not disclosed itself to him. He had, how- 



r.] -EARLY YEAKS. 23 

ever, already, at moments, a very pretty writer's touch, as 
witness this passage, quoted by Mr. Lathrop, and which is 
worth transcribing. The heroine has gone off with the 
nefarious Butler, and the good Dr. Melrnoth starts in pur- 
suit of her, attended by young Wolcott. 

" ' Alas, youth, these are strange times,' observed the 
President, 'when a doctor of divinity and an undergraduate 
set forth, like a knight-errant and his squire, in search of a 
stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of the church mil- 
itant, or a new^ species of polemical divinity. Pray Heaven, 
however, there be no such encounter in store for us ; for I 
utterly forgot to provide myself with weapons,' 

" ' I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight,' 
replied Edward, whose imagination was highly tickled by 
Dr. Melmoth's chivalrous comparison. 

" 'Ay, I see that you have girded on a sword,' said the di- 
vine. 'But wherewith shall I defend myself? my hand be- 
ing empty except of this golden-headed staff, the gift of Mr. 
Langton.' 

" ' One of these, if you will accept it,' answei-ed Edward, 
exhibiting a brace of pistols, ' will serve to begin the conflict 
before you join the battle hand to hand.' 

" ' Nay, I shall find little safety in meddling with that 
deadly instrument, since I know not accurately from which 
end proceeds the bullet,' said Dr. Melmoth. ' But were it 
not better, since we are so well provided with artillery, to 
betake ourselves, in the event of an encounter, to some stone 
wall or other place of strength ?' 

" ' If I may presume to advise,' said the squire, ' you, as 
being most valiant and experienced, should ride forward, 
lance in hand (your long staff serving for a lance), while I 
annoy the enemy from afar.' 

" 'Like Teucer, behind the shield of Ajax,' interrupted Dr. 
Melmoth, ' or David with his stone and sling. No, no, young 
man; I have left unfinished in my study a learned treatise, 



'^4 HAWTHORNE. [chap. i. 

important not only to the present age, but to posterity, for 
whose sake I must take heed to my safety. But, lo ! who 
rides yonder V " 

On leaving college, Hawthorne had gone back to live at 
Salem. 



II 



25 



CHAPTER II. 



EARLY M ANHO OD. 



The twelve years that followed were not the happiest or 
most brilliant phase of Hawthorne's life; they strike me, 
indeed, as having had an altogether peculiar dreariness. 
They had their uses; they were the period of incubation 
of the admirable compositions which eventually brought 
him reputation and prosperity. But of their actual aridi- 
ty the young man must have had a painful consciousness; 
he never lost the impression of it. Mr. Lathrop quotes a 
phrase to this effect from one of his letters, late in life. 
"I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of 
my early life, in the hope that ray share of adversity came 
then, when I bore it alone." And the same writer alludes 
to a touching passage in the English Note-Books, which I 
shall quote entire : — 

"I think I have been happier this Christmas (1854) than 
ever before — by my own fireside, and with my wife and 
children about me — more content to enjoy what I have, less 
anxious for anything beyond it, in this life. My early life 
was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life ; 
it having been such a blank that any thereafter would com- 
pare favourably with it. For a long, long while, I have occa- 
sionally been visited with a singular dream ; and I have an 
impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in 
2* 



26 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

• 

England. It is, that I am still at college, or sometimes even 
at school — and there is a sense that I have been there uncon- 
scionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress 
as my contemporaries have done ; and I seem to naeet some 
of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods 
over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, re- 
curring all through these twenty or' thirty years, must be one 
of the effects of that heavy seclusion ih which I shut myself 
up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody 
moved onward and left me behind. How strange that it 
should come now, when J may call myself famous and pros- 
perous 1 — when I am happy too." 

The allusion here is to a state of solitude which was the 
young man's positive choice at the time — or into which 
he drifted at least under the pressure of his natural shyness 
and reserve. He was not expansive ; he was not addicted 
to experiments and adventures of intercourse ; he was not 
personally, in a word, what is called sociable. The general 
impression of this silence-loving and shade-seeking side of 
his character is doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as it 
points to him as a sombre and sinister figure, is almost 
ludicrously at fault. He was silent, diffident, more inclined 
to hesitate — to watch, and wait, and meditate — than to pro- 
duce himself, and fonder, on almost any occasion, of being 
absent than of being present. This quality betrays itself 
in all his writings. There is in all of them something cold, 
and light, and thin — something belonging to the imagina- 
tion alone — which indicates a man but little disposed to 
multiply his relations, his points of contact, with society. 
If we read the six volumes of Note-Books with an eye to 
the evidence of this unsocial side of his life, we find it in 
sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time that 
there was nothing unamiable or invidious in his shyness, 



n.] EARLY MANHOOD. 27 

and, above all, that there was nothing preponderantly 
gloomy. The qualities to which the Note-Books most tes- 
tify are, on the whole, his serenity and amenity of mind. 
They reveal these characteristics, indeed, in an almost phe- 
nomenal degree. The serenity, the simplicity, seem in cer- 
tain portions almost child-like ; of brilliant gaiety, of high 
spirits, there is littk ; but the placidity and evenness of 
temper, the cheerful and contented view of the things he 
notes, never belie themselves. I know not what else he 
may have written in this copious record, and what passages 
of gloom and melancholy may have been suppressed ; but, 
as his Diaries stand, they offer in a remarkable degree the 
reflection of a mind whose development was not in the di- 
rection of sadness. A very clever French critic, whose fancy 
is often more lively than his observation is deep — M. Emile 
Montegut — writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in the 
year 1860, invents for our author the appellation of "Un 
Romancier Pessimiste." Superficially speaking, perhaps, 
the title is a happy one; but only superficially. Pessimism 
consists in having morbid and bitter views and theories 
about human nature ; not in indulging in shadowy fancies 
and conceits. There is nothing whatever to show that 
Hawthorne had any such doctrines or convictions; cer- 
tainly the note of depression, of despair, of the disposition 
to undervalue the human race, is never sounded in his Di- 
aries. These volumes contain the record of very few con- 
victions or theories of any kind ; they move with curious 
evenness, with a charming, graceful flow, on a level which 
lies above that of a man's philosophy. They adhere with 
such persistence to this upper level that they prompt the 
reader to believe that Hawthorne had no appreciable phi- 
losophy at all — no general views that were in the least un- 
comfortable. They are the exhibition of an unperplexed 
C 



28 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

intellect. I said just now that the development of Haw- 
thorne's mind was not towards sadness ; and I should be 
inclined to go still further, and say that his mind proper — 
his mind in so far as it was a repository of opinions and 
articles of faith — had no development that it is of especial 
importance to look into. What had a development was 
his imagination — that delicate and penetrating imagination 
which was always at play, always entertaining itself, always 
engaged in a game of hide-and-seek in the region in which 
it seemed to him that the game could best be played — 
among the shadows and substructions, the dark-based pil- 
lars and supports of our moral nature. Beneath this move- 
ment and ripple of his imagination — as free and sponta- 
neous as that of the sea-surface — lay directly his personal 
affections. These were solid and strong, but, according 
to my impression, they had the place very much to them- 
selves. 

His innocent reserve, then, and his exaggerated, but by 
no means cynical, relish for solitude, imposed themselves 
upon him, in a. great measure, with a persistency which 
helped to make the time a tolerably arid one — so arid a 
one, indeed, that we have seen that in the light of later 
happiness he pronounced it a blank. But in truth, if these 
were dull years, it was not all Hawthorne's fault. His sit- 
uation was intrinsically poor — poor with a poverty that 
one almost hesitates to look into. When we think of what 
the conditions of intellectual life, of taste, must have been 
in a small New England town fifty years ago ; and when 
we think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love 
of literature and romance, of the picturesque, of style and 
form and colour, trying to make a career for himself in 
the midst of them, compassion for the young man "becomes 
our dominant sentiment, and we see the large, dry, village- 



II.] EARLY MANHOOD. 29 

picture in perhaps almost too hard a light. It seems to 
me, then, that it was possibly a blessing for Hawthorne 
that he was not expansive and inquisitive, that he lived 
much to himself, and asked but little of his milieu. If he 
had been exacting and ambitious, if his appetite had been 
large and his knowledge various, he would probably have 
found the bounds of Salem intolerably narrow. But his 
culture had been of a simple sort — there was little of any 
other sort to be obtained in America in those days — and 
though he was doubtless haunted by visions of more sug- 
gestive opportunities, we may safely assume that he was 
not, to his own perception, the object of compassion that 
he appears to a critic who judges him after half a century's 
civilization has filtered into the twilight of that earlier time. 
If New England was socially a very small place in those 
days, Salem was a still smaller one ; and if the American 
tone at large was intensely provincial, that of New England 
was not greatly helped by having the best of it. The state 
of things was extremely natural, and there could be now 
no greater mistake than to speak of it with a redundancy 
of irony. American life had begun to constitute itself from 
the foundations ; it had begun to be, simply ; it was at an 
immeasurable distance from having begun to enjoy. I im- 
agine there was no appreciable group of people in New 
England at that time proposing to itself to enjoy life ; this 
was not an undertaking for which any provision had been 
made, or to which any encouragement was offered. Haw- 
thorne must have vaguely entertained some such design 
upon destiny ; but he must have felt that his success would 
have to depend wholly upon his own ingenuity. I say he 
must have proposed to himself to enjoy, simply because he 
proposed to be an artist, and because this enters inevitably 
into the artist's scheme. There are a thousand ways of 



so HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

enjojdng life, and that of the artist is one of the most in- 
nocent. But for all that, it connects itself with the idea 
of pleasure. He proposes to give pleasure, and to give it 
he must first get it. Where he gets it will depend upon 
circumstances, and circumstances were not encouraging to 
Hawthorne. 

He was poor, he was solitary, and he undertook to de- 
vote himself to literature in a community in which the in- 
terest in literature was as yet of the smallest. It is not 
too much to say that even to the present day it is a con- 
siderable discomfort in the United States not to be "in 
business." The young man who attempts to launch him- 
self in a career that does not belong to the so-called prac- 
tical order; the young man who has not, in a word, an 
office in the business quarter of the town, with his name 
painted on the door, has but a limited place in the social 
system, finds no particular bough to perch upon. He is 
not looked at askance, he is not regarded as an idler ; lit- 
erature and the arts have always been held in extreme hon- 
our in the American world, and those who practise them 
^re received on easier terms than in other countries. If 
the tone of the American world is in some respects pro- 
vincial, it is in none more so than in this matter of the 
exaggerated homage rendered to authorship. The gentle- 
man or the lady who has written a book is in many circles 
the object of an admiration too indiscriminating to operate 
as an encouragement to good writing. There is no reason 
to suppose that this was less the case fifty years ago ; but 
fifty years ago, greatly more than now, the literary man 
must have lacked the comfort and inspiration of belonging 
to a class. The best things come, as a general thing, from 
the talents that are riiembers of a group ; every man works 
better when he has companions working in the same line, 



II.] EARLY MANHOOD. 31 

and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emu- 
lation. Great things, of course, have been done by solita- 
ry workers ; but they have usually been done with double 
the pains they would have cost if they had been produced 
in more genial circumstances. The solitary worker loses 
the profit of example and discussion ; he is apt to make 
awkward experiments ; he is in the nature of the case more 
or less of an empiric. The empiric may, as I say, be 
treated by the world as an expert; but the drawbacks and 
discomforts of empiricism remain to him, and are in fact 
increased by the suspicion that is mingled with his grati- 
tude, of a want in the public taste of a sense of the pro- 
portions of things. Poor Hawthorne, beginning to wjite 
subtle short tales at Salem, was empirical enough ; he was 
one of, at most, some dozen Americans who had taken up 
literature as a profession. The profession in the United 
States is still very young, and of diminutive stature ; but 
in the year 1830 its head could hardly have been seen 
above-ground. It strikes the observer of to-day that Haw- 
thorne showed great courage in entering a field in which 
the honours and emoluments were so scanty as the profits 
of authorship must have been at that time. I have said 
that in the United States at present authorship is a pedes- 
tal, and literature is the fashion ; but Hawthorne's history 
is a proof that it was possible, fifty years ago, to write a 
great many little masterpieces without becoming known. 
He begins the preface to the Twice-Told Tales by remark- 
ing that he was " for many years the obscurest man of let- 
ters in America." When once this work obtained recoo;- 
nition, the recognition left little to be desired. Hawthorne 
never, I believe, made large sums of money by his writings, 
and the early profits of these charming sketches could not 
have been considerable; for manv ot them, indeed, as they 



32 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

appeared in journals and magazines, lie had never been 
paid at all ; but the honour, when once it dawned — and it 
dawned tolerably early in the author's career— was never 
thereafter wanting. Hawthorne's countrymen are solidly 
proud of him, and the tone of Mr. Lathrop's Study is in 
itself sufficient evidence of the manner in which an Ameri- 
can story-teller may in some cases look to have his eulogy 
pronounced. 

Hawthorne's early attempt to support himself by his 
penl appears to have been deliberate ; we hear nothing of 
those experiments in counting-houses or lawyers' offices, of 
which a permanent invocation to the Muse is often the 
inqonsequent sequel. He began to write, and to try and 
di4)ose of his writings ; and he remained at Salem appar- 
ently only because his family — his mother and his two sis- 
tejs — 'lived there. His mother had a house, of which, dur- 
ing the twelve years that elapsed until 1838, he appears to 
have been an inmate. Mr. Lathrop learned from his sur- 
viving sister that, after publishing Fanshaive, he produced 
a group of short stories, entitled Seven Tales of my Native 
[and, and that this lady retained a very favourable recol- 
lection of the work, which her brother had given her to 
read. But it never saw the light; his attempts to get it 
published were unsuccessful ; and at last, in a fit of irri- 
tation and despair, the young author burned the manu- 
script. 

There is probably something autobiographic in the 
striking little tale of The Devil in Manuscrrpt. " They 
have been offered to seventeen publishers," says the hero, 
of that sketch in regard to a pile of his own lucubrations. 

" It would make you stare to read their answers. . . . One 
man publishes nothing but school-books; another has five 



II.] EARLY MANHOOD. 33 

novels already under examination ; . . . another gentleman is 
just giving up business, on purpose, I verily believe, to avoid 
publishing my book. In short, of all the seventeen book- 
sellers, only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and 
he — a literary dabbler himself, I should judge — has the im- 
pertinence to criticise them, proposing what he calls vast im.- 
proveinents, and concluding, after a general sentence of con- 
demnation, with the definitive assurance that he will not be 
concerned on any terms. . . . But there does seem to be one 
righteous man among these seventeen unrighteous ones, and 
he tells me, fairly, that no American publisher will meddle 
with an American work — seldom if by a known writer, and 
never if by a new one — unless at the writer's risk." 

But though the Seven Tales were not printed, Haw- 
thorne proceeded to write others that were ; the two col- 
lections of the Tivice-Told Tales, and the Snow Image, 
are gathered from a series of contributions to the local 
journals and the annuals of that day. To make these 
three volumes, he picked out the things he thought the 
best. " Some very small part," he says of what remains, 
" might yet be rummaged out (but it would not be worth 
the trouble), among the dingy pages of fifteen or twenty- 
years-old periodicals, or within the shabby morocco covers 
of faded Souvenirs^ These three volumes represent no 
large amount of literary labour for so long a period, and 
the author admits that there is little to show " for the 
thought and industry of that portion of his life." He 
attributes the paucity of his productions to a "total lack 
of sympathy at the age when his mind would naturally 
have been most effervescent." " He had no incitement to 
literary effort in a reasonable prospect of reputation or 
profit ; nothing but the pleasure itself of composition, an 
enjoyment not at all amiss in its way, and perhaps essen- 



84 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

tial to the merit of the work in hand, but which in the 
long run will hardly keep the chill out of a writer's heart, 
or the numbness out of his fingers." These words occur 
in the preface attached in 1851 to the second edition of 
the Tioice-Told Tales ; apropos of which I may say that 
there is always a charm in Hawthorne's prefaces which 
makes one grateful for a pretext to quote from them. At 
this time The Scarlet Letter had just made his fame, and 
the short tales were certain of a large welcome; but the 
account he gives of the failure of the earlier edition to 
produce a sensation (it had been published in two vol- 
umes, at four years apart), may appear to contradict my 
assertion that, though he was not recognised immediately, 
he was recognised betimes. In 1850, when The Scarlet 
Letter appeared, Hawthorne was forty-six years old, and 
this may certainly seem a long-delayed popularity. On 
the other hand, it must be remembered that he had not 
appealed to the world with any great energy. The Twice- 
Told Tales, charming as they are, do not constitute a very 
massive literary pedestal. As soon as the author, resort' 
ing to severer measures, put forth The Scarlet Letter, the 
public ear was touched and charmed, and after that it was 
held to the end. " Well it might have been !" the reader 
will exclaim. " But what a grievous pity that the dulness 
of this same organ should have operated so long as a de- 
terrent, and, by making Hawthorne wait till he was nearly 
fifty to publish his first novel, have abbreviated by so much 
his productive career 1" The truth is, he cannot have been 
in any very high degree ambitious; he was not an abun- 
dant producer, and there was manifestly a strain of gen- 
erous indolence in his composition. There was a lovable 
want of eagerness about him. Let the encouragement of- 
fered have been what it might, he had waited till he was 



II.] EARLY MANHOOD. 35 

lapsing from middle-life to strike his first noticeable blow ; 
and during the last ten years of his career he put forth but 
two complete works, and the fragment of a third. 

It is very true, however, that during this early period 
he seems to have been very glad to do whatever came to 
his hand. Certain of his tales found their way into one 
of the annuals of the time, a publication endowed with the 
brilliant title of The Boston Token and Atlantic Souvenir, 
The editor of this graceful repository was S. G. Goodrich, 
a gentleman who, I suppose, may be called one of the pi- 
oneers of American periodical literature. He is better 
known to the world as Mr. Peter Parley, a name under 
which he produced a multitude of popular school-books, 
story-books, and other attempts to vulgarize human knowl- 
edge and adapt it to the infant mind. This enterprising 
purveyor of literary wares appears, incongruously enough, 
to have been Hawthorne's earliest protector, if protection 
is the proper word for the treatment that the young au- 
thor received from him. Mr. Goodrich induced him, in 
1836, to go to Boston to edita periodical in which he was 
interested. The American Magazine of Useful and Enter- 
taining Knowledge. I have never seen the work in ques- 
tion, but Hawthorne's biographer gives a sorry account of 
it. It was managed by the so-called Bewick Company, 
which " took its name from Thomas Bewick, the English 
restorer of the art of wood-engraving, and the magazine 
was to do his memory honour by his admirable illustra- 
tions. But in fact it never did any one honour, nor 
brought any one profit. It was a penny popular affair, 
containing condensed information about innumerable sub- 
jects, no fiction, and little poetry. The woodcuts were of 
the crudest and most frightful sort. It passed through the 
hands of several editors and several publishers. Hawthorne 



36 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

was engaged at a salary of five hundred dollars a year ; but 
it appears that he got next to nothing, and did not stay in 
the position long." Hawthorne wrote from Boston in the 
winter of 1836: "I came here trusting to Goodrich's pos- 
itive promise to pay me forty -five dollars as soon as I ar- 
rived ; and he has kept promising from one day to another, 
till I do not see that he means to pay at all. I have now 
broke off all intercourse with him, and never think of go- 
ing near him. ... I don't feel at all obliged to him about 
the editorship, for he is a stockholder and director in the 
Bewick Company, . . . and I defy them to get another to 
do for a thousand dollars what I do for five hundred." — 
"I make nothing," he says in another letter, "of writing a 
history or biography before dinner." Goodrich proposed 
to him to write a Universal History for the use of schools, 
offering him a hundred dollars for his share in the work. 
Hawthorne accepted the offer, and took a hand — I know 
not how large a one — in the job. His biographer has 
been able to identify a single phrase as our author's. He 
is speaking of George IV.: "'Even when he was quite a 
young man, this King cared as much about dress as any 
young coxcomb. He had a great deal of taste in such 
matters, and it is a pity that he was a King, for he might 
otherwise have made an excellent tailor." The Universal 
History h^di a great vogue, and passed through hundreds 
of editions; but it does not appear that Hawthorne ever 
received more than his hundred dollars. *The writer of 
these pages vividly remembers making its acquaintance at 
an early stage of his education — a very fat, stumpy-looking 
book, bound in boards covered with green paper, and hav- 
ing in the text very small woodcuts of the most primitive 
sort. He associates it to this day with the names of Se- 
sostris and Semiramis whenever he encounters them, there 



n.] EARLY MANHOOD. 37 

having been, he supposes, some account of the conquests 
of these potentates that would impress itself upon the im- 
agination of a child. At the end of four months Haw- 
thorne had received but twenty dollars — four pounds — for 
his editorship of the American Magazine. 

There is something pitiful in this episode, and some- 
thing really touching in the sight of a delicate and supe- 
rior genius obliged to concern himself with such paltry un- 
dertakings. The simple fact was that for a man attempt- 
ing at that time in America to live by his pen, there were 
no larger openings ; and to live at all Hawthorne had, as 
the phrase is, to make himself small. This cost him less,, 
moreover, than it would have cost a more copious and 
strenuous genius, for his modesty was evidently extreme, 
and I doubt whether he had any very ardent consciousness 
of rare talent. He went back to Salem ; and from this 
tranquil standpoint, in the spring of 1837, he watched the 
first volume of his Twice-Told Tales come into the world. 
He had by this time been living some ten years of his 
manhood in Salem, and an American commentator may be 
excused for feeling the desire to construct, from the very 
scanty material that offers itself, a slight picture of his life 
there. I have quoted his own allusions to its dulness and 
blankness, but I confess that these observations serve rather 
to quicken than to depress my curiosity. A biographer 
has of necessity a relish for detail ; his business is to mul- 
tiply points of characterisation. Mr. Lathrop tells us that 
our author " had little communication with even the mem- 
bers of his family. Frequently his meals were brought 
and left at his locked door, and it was not often that the 
four inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in 
family circle. He never read his stories aloud to his 
mother and sisters. ... It was the custom in this house- 



38 HAWTHORNE, [chap. 

hold for the several members to remain very much by 
themselves ; the three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigor- 
ous recluses as himself, and, speaking of the isolation which 
reigned among them, Hawthorne once said, ' We do not 
even live at our house !' " It is added that he was not in 
the habit of going to church. This is not a lively picture ; 
nor is that other sketch of his daily habits much more ex- 
hilarating, in which Mr. Lathrop affirms that though the 
statement that for several years "he never saw the sun" is 
entirely an error, yet it is true that he stirred little abroad 
all day, and " seldom chose to walk in the town except at 
night." In the dusky hours he took walks of many miles 
along the coast, or else wandered about the sleeping streets 
of Salem. These were his pastimes, and these were ap- 
parently his most intimate occasions of contact with life. 
Life, on such occasions, was not very exuberant, as any one 
will reflect who has been acquainted with the physiogno- 
my of a small New England town after nine o'clock in the 
evening. Hawthorne, however, was an inveterate observer 
of small things, and he found a field for fancy among 
the most trivial accidents. There could be no better ex- 
ample of this happy faculty than the little paper entitled 
"Night Sketches," included among the Twice-Told Tales. 
This small dissertation is about nothing at all, and to call 
attention to it is almost to overrate its importance. This 
fact is equally true, indeed, of a great many of its compan- 
ions, which give even the most appreciative critic a singu- 
lar feeling of his own indiscretion — almost of his own cru- 
elty. They are so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial, that 
simply to mention them is to put them in a false position. 
The author's claim for them is barely audible, even to the 
most acute listener. They are things to take or to leave 
—to enjoy, but not to talk about. Not to read them 



II.] EARLY MANHOOD. 39 

would be to do them an injustice (to read them is essen- 
tially to relish them), but to bring the machinery of criti- 
cism to bear upon them would be to do them a still greater 
wrong. I must remember, however, that to carry this prin- 
ciple too far would be to endanger the general validity of 
the present little work — a consummation which it can only 
be my desire to avert. Therefore it is that I think it per- 
missible to remark that in Hawthorne the whole class of 
little descriptive effusions directed upon common things, to 
which these just-mentioned Night Sketches belong, have a 
greater charm than there is any warrant for in their sub- 
stance. The charm is made up of the spontaneity, the per- 
sonal quality, of the fancy that plays through them, its 
mingled simplicity and subtlety, its purity and its bon- 
homie. The Night Sketches are simply the light, familiar 
record of a walk under an umbrella, at the end of a long, 
dull, rainy day, through the sloppy, ill-paved streets of a 
country town, where the rare gas-lamps twinkle in the large 
puddles, and the blue jars in the druggist's window shine 
through the vulgar drizzle. One would say that the inspi- 
ration of such a theme could have had no great force, and 
such doubtless was the case; but out of the Salem pud- 
dles, nevertheless, springs, flower-like, a charming and nat- 
ural piece of prose. 

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small 
things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing 
too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the 
measure of his perception of common and casual things, 
and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. 
These Note-Books, by the way — this seems as good a 
place as any other to say it — are a very singular series of 
volumes ; I doubt whether there is anything exactly cor- 
responding to them in the whole body of literature. They 



40 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

were published — in six volumes, issued at intervals — some 
years after Hawthorne's death, and no person attempting 
to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret 
that they should have been given to the world. There is 
a point of view from which this may be regretted; but 
the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many docu- 
ments as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, 
for the Note-Books; but I am obliged to confess that, 
though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a 
loss to perceive how they came to be written — what was 
Hawthorne's purpose in carrying on for so many years 
this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person de- 
siring information about him at any cost, it is valuable ; 
it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the 
nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering 
what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very 
partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still 
smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play 
much the larger part in it ; opinions, convictions, ideas 
pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his 
Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any 
reflections that might be adapted for publicity ; the sim- 
plest way to describe the tone of these extremely objec- 
tive journals is to say that they read like a series of very 
pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, let- 
ters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions 
that they might be opened in the post, should have de- 
termined to insert nothing compromising. They contain 
much that is too futile for things intended for publicity ; 
whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private im- 
pressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. 
They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne's 
mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it). 



II.] EARLY MANHOOD. 41 

but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as 
by what we find in them. Our business for the moment, 
however, is not with the light that they throw upon his 
intellect, but with the information they offer about his 
habits and his social circumstances. 

I know not at what age he began to keep a diiiry ; the 
first entries in the American volumes are of the summer 
of 1835. There is a phrase in the preface to his novel of 
Transformation^ which must have lingered in the minds 
of many Americans who have tried to write novels, and to 
lay the scene of them in the Western world. " No author, 
without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a 
romance about a country where there is no shadow, no an- 
tiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor 
anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and sim- 
ple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native 
land." The perusal of Hawthorne's American Note-Books 
operates as a practical commentary upon this somewhat 
ominous text. It does so at least to my own mind ; it 
would be too much, perhaps, to say that the effect would 
be the same for the usual English reader. An American 
reads between the lines^he completes the suggestions — 
he constructs a picture. I think I am not guilty of any 
gross injustice in saying that the picture he constructs 
from Hawthorne's American diaries, though by no means 
without charms of its own, is not, on the whole, an inter- 
esting one. It is characterised by an extraordinary blank- 
ness — a curious paleness of colour and paucity of detail. 
Hawthorne, as I have said, has a large and healthy appe- 
tite for detail, and one is, therefore, the more struck with 
the lightness of the diet to which his observation was con- 
demned. For myself, as I turn the pages of his journals, 
I seem to see the image of the crude and simple society 
3 



42 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

in which he lived. I use these epithets, of course, not in- 
vidiously, but descriptively ; if one desire to enter as close- 
ly as possible into Hawthorne's situation, one must en- 
deavour to reproduce his circumstances. We are struck 
with the large number of elements that were absent from 
them, and the coldness, the thinness, the blankness, to re- 
peat my epithet, present themselves so vividly that our 
foremost feeling is that of compassion for a romancer 
looking for subjects in such a field. It takes so many 
things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he 
made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer Eu- 
ropean spectacle — it takes such an accumulation of his- 
tory and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, 
to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist. If Haw- 
thorne had been a young Englishman, or a young French- 
man of the same degroe of genius, the same cast of mind, 
the same habits, his consciousness of the world around 
him would have been a very different affair ; however ob- 
scure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of 
the life of his fellow-mortals would have been almost in- 
finitely more various. The negative side of the spectacle 
on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative 
saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little in- 
genuity, be made almost ludicrous ; one might enumerate 
the items of high civilization, as it exists in other coun- 
tries, which are absent from the texture of American life, 
until it should become a wonder to know what was left. 
No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed 
barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, 
no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, 
no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no 
palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor 
parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no 



II.] EARLY MANHOOD. 43 

cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no 
great Universities nor public schools — no Oxford, nor 
Eton, nor Harrow ; no literature, no novels, no museums, 
no pictures, no political society, no sporting class — no Ep- 
som nor Ascot ! Some such list as that might be drawn 
up of the absent things in American life — especially in 
the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, 
upon an English or a French imagination, would probably, 
as a general thing, be appalling. The natural remark, in 
the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that 
if these things are left out, everything is left out. The 
American knows that a good deal remains ; what it is that 
remains — that is his secret, his joke, as one may say. It 
would be cruel, in this terrible denudation, to deny him 
the consolation of his natural gift, that " American hu- 
mour" of which of late years we have heard so much. 

But in helping us to measure what remains, our author's 
Diaries, as I have already intimated, would give comfort 
rather to persons who might have taken the alarm from 
the brief sketch I have just attempted of what I have 
called the negative side of the American social situation, 
than to those reminding themselves of its fine compensa- 
tions. Hawthorne's entries are to a great degree accounts 
of walks in the country, drives in stage-coaches, people he 
met in taverns. The minuteness of the things that attract 
his attention, and that he deems worthy of being com- 
memorated, is frequently extreme, and from this fact we 
get the impression of a general vacancy in the field of 
vision. " Sunday evening, going by the jail, the setting 
sun kindled up the windows most cheerfully ; as if there 
were a bright, comfortable light within its darksome stone 
wall." " I went yesterday with Monsieur S to pick 

raspberries. He fell through an old log -bridge, thrown 
D 



44 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

over a hollow ; looking back, only his head and shoulders 
appeared through the rotten logs and among the bushes. 
A shower coming on, the rapid running of a little bare- 
footed boy, coming up unheard, and dashing swiftly past 
us, and showing us the soles of his naked feet as he ran 
adown the path and up the opposite side." In another 
place he devotes a page to a description of a dog whom 
he saw running round after its tail ; in still another he 
remarks, in a paragraph by itself — "The aromatic odor 
of peat-smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." 
The reader says to himself that when a man turned thirty 
gives a place in his mind — and his inkstand — to such trifles 
as these, it is because nothing else of superior importance 
demands admission. Everything \ji the Notes indicates 
a simple, democratic, thinly -composed society ; there is no. 
evidence of the writer finding himself in any variety or 
intimacy of relations with any one or with anything. We 
find a good deal of warrant for believing that if we add 
that statement of Mr. Lathrop's about his meals being left 
at the door of his room, to rural rambles of which an im- 
pression of the temporary phases of the local apple-crop 
were the usual, and an encounter with an organ-grinder, 
or an eccentric dog, the rarer, outcome, we construct a 
rough image of our author's daily life during the several 
years that preceded his marriage. He appears to have 
read a good deal ; and that he must have been familiar 
with the sources of gQod English, we see from his charm- 
ing, expressive, slightly self - conscious, cultivated, but not 
too cultivated, style. Yet neither in these early volumes 
of his Note-Books, nor in the later, is there any mention 
of his reading. There are no literary judgments or im- 
pressions — there is almost no allusion to works or to au- 
thors. The allusions to individuals of any kind are indeed 



II.] EAKLT MANHOOD. 45 

much less numerous than one might have expected ; there 
is little psychology, little description of manners. We are 
told by Mr. Lathrop that there existed at Salem, during 
the early part of Hawthorne's life, "a strong circle of 
wealthy families," which " maintained rigorously the dis- 
tinctions of class," and whose " entertainments were splen- 
did, their manners magnificent." This is a rather pictorial 
way of saying that there were a number of people in the 
place — the commercial and professional aristocracy, as it 
were — who lived in high comfort and respectability, and 
who, in their small provincial way, doubtless had preten- 
sions to be exclusive. Into this delectable company Mr. 
Lathrop intimates that his hero was free to penetrate. It 
is easy to believe it ; and it would be diflScult to perceive 
why the privilege should have been denied to a young 
man of genius and culture, who was very good - looking 
(Hawthorne must have been in these days, judging by his 
appearance later in life, a strikingly handsome fellow), and 
whose American pedigree was virtually as long as the 
longest they could show. But in fact Hawthorne appears 
to have ignored the good society of his native place almost 
completely ; no echo of its conversation is to be found in 
his tales or- his journals. Such an echo would possibly 
not have been especially melodious ; and if we regret the 
shyness and stiffness, the reserve, the timidity, the sus- 
picion, or whatever it was, that kept him from knowing 
what there was to be known, it is not because we have 
any very definite assurance that his gains would have been 
great. Still, since a beautiful writer was growing up in 
Salem, it is a pity that he should not have given himself 
a chance to commemorate some of the types that flourish- 
ed m the richest soil of the place. Like almost all people 
who possess in a strong degree the story-telling faculty, 



46 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

Hawthorne Lad a democratic strain in his composition, 
and a relish for the commoner stuff of human nature. 
Thoroughly American in all ways, he was in none more 
so than in the vagueness of his sense of social distinctions, 
and his readiness to forget them if a moral or intellectual 
sensation were to be gained by it. He liked to fraternise 
with plain people, to take them on their own terms, and 
put himself, if possible, into their shoes. His Note-Books, 
and even his tales, are full of evidence of this easy and 
natural feeling about all his unconventional fellow-mortals 
— this imaginative interest and contemplative curiosity ; 
and it sometimes takes the most charming and graceful 
forms. Commingled as it is with his own subtlety and 
delicacy, his complete exemption from vulgarity, it is one 
of the points in his character which his reader comes 
most to appreciate — that reader I mean for whom he is 
not, as foi; some few, a dusky and malarious genius. 

> But even if he had had personally as many pretensions 
as he had few, he must, in the nature of things, have been 
more or less of a consenting democrat, for democracy was 
the very key-stone of the simple social structure in which 
he played his part. The air of his journals and his tales 
alike are full of the genuine democratic feeling. This 
feeling has by no means passed out of New England life ; 
it still flourishes in perfection in the great stock of the 
people, especially in rural communities ; but it is probable 
that at the present hour a writer of Hawthorne's general 
fastidiousness would not express it quite so artlessly. " A 
shrewd gentlewoman, who kept a tavern in the town," he 
says, in Chippings with a Chisel, " was anxious to obtain 
two or three gravestones for the deceased members of her 
family, and to pay for these solemn commodities by tak- 
ing the sculptor to board." This image of a gentlewoman 



II.] EARLY MANHOOD. 47 

keeping a tavern and looking out for boarders, seems, from 
the point of view to vi^hich I allude, not at Till incongruous. 
It will be observed that the lady in question was shrewd ; 
it was probable that she was substantially educated, and 
of reputable life, and it is certain that she was energetic. 
These qualities would make it natural to Hawthorne to 
speak of her as a gentlewoman; the natural tendency in 
societies where the sense of equality prevails being to 
take for granted the high level rather than the low. Per- 
haps the most striking example of the democratic senti- 
ment in all our author's tales, however, is the figure of Un- 
cle Yenner, in The House of the Seven Gables. Uncle Ven- 
ner is a poor old man in a brimless hat and patched trou- 
sers, who picks up a precarious subsistence by rendering, 
for a compensation, in the houses and gardens of the good 
people of Salem, those services that are known in New 
England as " chores." He carries parcels, splits fire-wood, 
digs potatoes, collects refuse for the maintenance of his 
pigs, and looks forward with philosophic equanimity to 
the time when he shall end his days in the almshouse. 
But, in spite of the very modest place that he occupies in 
the social scale, he is received on a footing of familiarity 
in the household of the far - descended Miss Pyncheon ; 
and when this ancient lady and her companions take the 
air in the garden of a summer evening, he steps into the 
estimable circle and mingles the smoke of his pipe with 
their refined conversation. This, obviously, is rather im- 
aginative — Uncle Venner is a creation with a purpose. 
He is an original, a natural moralist, a philosopher ; and 
Hawthorne, who knew perfectly what he was about in in- 
troducing him — Hawthorne always knew perfectly what 
he was about — wished to give in his person an example 
of humorous resionation and of a life reduced to the sim- 



48 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

plest and homeliest elements, as opposed to the fantastic 
pretensions of the antiquated heroine of the story. He 
wished to strike a certain exclusively human and personal 
note. He knew that for this purpose he was taking a li- 
cense ; but the point is that he felt he was not indulging 
in any extravagant violation of reality. Giving in a let- 
ter, about 1830, an account of a little journey he was mak- 
ing in Connecticut, lie says, of the end of a seventeen miles' 
stage, that " in the evening, however, I went to a Bible- 
class with a very polite and agreeable gentleman, whom I 
afterwards discovered to be a strolling tailor of very ques- 
tionable habits." , 

Hawthorne appears on various occasions to have absent- 
ed himself from Salem, and to have wandered somewhat 
through the New England States. But the only one of 
these episodes of which there is a considerable account in 
the Note-Books is a visit that he paid in the summer of 
1837 to his old college - mate, Horatio Bridge, who was 
living upon his father's property in Maine, in company 
with an eccentric young Frenchman, a teacher of his native 
tongue, who was looking for pupils among the Northern 
forests. I have said that there was less psychology in 
Hawthorne's Journals than might have been looked for; 
but there is nevertheless a certain amount of it, and no- 
where more than in a number of pages relating to this re- 
markable '* Monsieur S." (Hawthorne, intimate as he ap- 
parently became with him, always calls him " Monsieur," 
just as throughout all his Diaries he invariably speaks of all 
his friends, even the most familiar, as " Mr." He confers 
the prefix upon the unconventional Thoreau, his fellow- 
woodsman at Concord, and upon the emancipated brethren 
at Brook Farm.) These pages are completely occupied 
with Monsieur S., who \^as evidently a man of character. 



il] early manhood. 49 

with the full complement of his national vivacity. There 
is an elaborate effort to analyse the poor young French- 
man's disposition, something conscientious and painstak- 
ing, respectful, explicit, almost solemn. These passages are 
very curious as a reminder of the absence of the off-hand 
element in the manner in which many Americans, and 
many New Englanders especially, make up their minds 
about people whom they meet. This, in turn, is a reminder 
of something that may be called the importance of the in- 
dividual in the American world; which is a result of the 
newness and youthf ulness of society, and of the absence of 
keen competition. The individual counts for more, as it 
were, and, thanks to the absence of a variety of social types 
and of settled heads under which he may be easily and 
conveniently pigeon-holed, he is to a certain extent a won- 
der and a mystery. An Englishman, a Frenchman — a 
Frenchman above all — judges quickly, easily, from his own 
social standpoint, and makes an end of it. He has not 
that rather chilly and isolated sense of moral responsibility 
which is apt to visit a New Englander in such processes ; 
and he has the advantage that his standards are fixed by 
the general consent of the society in which he lives. A 
Frenchman, in this respect, is particularly happy and com- 
fortable, happy and comfortable to a degree which I think ' 
is hardly to be over-estimated; his standards being the 
most definite in the world, the most easily and promptly 
appealed to, and the most identical with what happens to 
be the practice of the French genius itself. The English- 
man is not quite so well off, but he is better off than his 
poor interrogative and tentative cousin beyond the seas. 
He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and hair- 
splitting is the occupation he most despises. There is al- 
ways a little of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson . 
3* 



50 HAWTHOKNE. [chap. ii. 

would have had wofully little patience with that tendency 
to weigh moonbeams which in Hawthorne was almost as 
much a quality of race as of genius; albeit that Haw- 
thorne has paid to Boswell's hero (in the chapter on 
" Lichfield and Uttoxeter," in his volume on England) a 
tribute of the finest appreciation. American intellectual 
standards are vague, and Hawthorne's countrymen are apt 
to hold the scales with a rather uncertain hand and a some- 
what agitated conscience. 



CHAPTER III. 



EARLY WRITINGS 



The second volume of the Twice-Told Tales was publish- 
ed in 1845, in Boston ; and at this time a good many of 
the stories which were afterwards collected into the Mosses 
from an Old Manse had already appeared, chiefly in The 
Democratic Review, a sufficiently flourishing periodical of 
that period. In mentioning these things, I anticipate ; 
but I touch upon the year 1845 in order to speak of 
*the two collections of Twice-Told Tales at once. Dur- 
ing the same year Hawthorne edited an interesting vol- 
ume, the Journals of an African Cruiser, by his friend 
Bridge, who had gone into the Navy and seen something 
of distant waters. His biographer mentions that even 
then Hawthorne's name was thought to bespeak attention 
for a book, and he insists on this fact in contradiction to 
the idea that his productions had hitherto been as little 
noticed as his own declaration that he remained " for a 
good many years the obscurest man of letters in Ameri- 
ca," might lead one, and has led many people, to suppose. 
" In this dismal chamber Fame was won," he writes in 
Salem, in 1836. And we find in the Kote-Books (1840) 
this singularly beautiful and touching passage : — 



52 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

" Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used 
to sit in days gone by. . . , Here I have written many tales 
— many that have been burned to ashes, many that have 
doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called 
a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions 
have appeared to me in it ; and some few of them have be- 
come visible to the world. If ever I should have a biogra- 
pher, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my 
memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted 
here, and here my mind and character w^ere formed ; and 
here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been de- 
spondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patient- 
ly for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why 
it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know 
me at all — at least till I were in my grave. And sometimes 
it seems to me as if I were already in the grave, with only life 
enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was hap- 
py — at least as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware 
of the possibility of being. By and by the world found me 
out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth — not, indeed, 
with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still small 
voice — and forth I went, but found nothiilg in the world I 
thought preferable to my solitude till now. . . . And now I 
begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in 
this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through 
the viewless bolts and bars ; for if I had sooner made my 
escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, 
and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might 
have become callous by rude encounters with the multi- 
tude. . . . But living in solitude till the falness of time was 
come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of 
my heart. ... I used to think that I could imagine all pas- 
sions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind ; but how 
little did I know ? . . . Indeed, we are but shadows : we are 
not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real 
about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream— till the 



m.] EARLY WRITINGS. 53 

heart be touched. That touch creates us — then we begin 
to be — thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of 
eternity." 

There is something exquisite in the soft philosophy of 
this little retrospect, and it helps us to appreciate it to 
know that the writer had at this time just become engaged 
to be married to a charming and accomplished person, 
with whom his union, which took place two years later, 
was complete and full of happiness. But I quote it more 
particularly for the evidence it affords that, already in 
1840, Hawthorne could speak of the world finding him 
out and calling him forth, as of an event tolerably well in 
the past. He had sent the first of the Twice-Told series 
to his old college friend, Longfellow, who had already 
laid, solidly, the foundation of his great poetic reputa- 
tion, and at the time of his sending it had written him a 
letter from which it will be to out purpose to quote a few 
lines : — 

" You tell me you have met with troubles and changes. I 
know not what these may have been ; but I can assure you 
that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that 
there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share 
in either its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years I have 
not lived, but only dreamed of living. It may be true that 
there may have been some unsubstantial pleasures here in 
the shade, which I might have missed in the sunshine, but 
you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all 
my retrospects are. I have laid up no treasure of pleasant 
remembrances against old age ; but there is some comfort in 
thinking that future years may be more varied, and therefore 
more tolerable, than the past. You give me more credit than 
I deserve in supposing that I have led a studious life. I 
have indeed turned over a good many books, but in so des- 
ultory a way that it cannot be called study, nor has it left me 



54 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

the fruits of study. ... I have another great difficulty in the 
lack of materials; for I have seen so little of the world that 
I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of, and it is 
not easy to give a life-like semblance to such shadowy stuff. 
Sometimes, through a peephole, I have caught a glimpse of 
the real world, and the two or three articles in which I have 
portrayed these glimpses please me better than the others." 

It is more particularly for the sake of the concluding 
lines that I have quoted this passage ; for evidently no 
portrait of Hawthorne at this period is at all exact which 
fails to insist upon the constant struggle which must have 
gone on between his shyness and his desire to know some- 
thing of life; between what may be called his evasive and 
his inquisitive tendencies. I suppose it is no injustice to 
Hawthorne to say that, on the whole, his shyness always 
prevailed ; and yet, obviously, the struggle was constantly 
there. He says of his Twice-Told Tales, in the preface, 
"They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own 
mind and heart (had it been so they could hardly have 
failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable,) but 
his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open 
an intercourse with the world." We are speaking here of 
small things, it must be remembered — of little attempts, 
little sketches, a little world. But everything is relative, 
and this smallness of scale must not render less apparent 
the interesting character of Hawthorne's efforts. As for 
the Twice-Told Tales themselves, they are an old story 
now ; every one knows them a little, and those who ad- 
mire them particularly havc/fead them a great many times. 
The writer of this sketch belongs to the latter class, and 
he has been trying to ;f6rget his familiarity with them, and 
ask himself what impression they would have made upon 
him at the time they appeared, in the first bloom of their 



"i] EARLY WRITINGS. 



55 



freshness, and before tbe particular Hawthorne-quality, as 
it may be called, had become an established, a recognised 
and valued, fact. Certainly I am inclined to think, if one 
had encountered these delicate, dusky flowers in the blos- 
somless garden of American journalism, one would have 
plucked them with a very tender hand; one would have 
felt that here was something essentially fresh and new ; 
here, in no extraordinary force or abundance, but in a de- 
gree distinctly appreciable, was an original element in lit- 
erature. When I think of it, I almost envy Hawthorne's 
earliest readers ; the sensation of opening upon The Great 
Carbuncle, The Seven Vagabonds, or The Threefold Desti- 
ny in an American annual of forty years ago, must have 
been highly agreeable. 

Among these short^er things (it is- better to speak of 
the whole collection, including the Snow Image and the 
Mosses from an Old Manse, at once) there are three sorts 
of tales, each one of which has an original stamp. There 
are, to begin with, the stories of fantasy and allegory— 
those among which the three I have just mentioned would 
be numbered, and which, on the whole, are the most origi- 
nal. This is the group to which such little masterpieces as 
Malvin's Burial, Raj^pacini's Daughter, and Young Good- 
man Brown also belong — these two last perhaps represent- 
ing the highest point that Hawthorne reached in this di- 
rection. Then there are the little tales of New England 
history, which are scarcely less admirable, and of which 
The Grey Champion, The Maypole of Merry Mount, and 
the four beautiful Legends of th^ Province House, as they 
are called, are the most successful specimens. Lastly come 
the slender sketches of actual scenes and of the objects 
and manners about him, by means of which, more partic- 
ularly, he endeavoured " to open an intercourse with the 



56 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

world," and which, in spite of their slenderness, have an 
infinite grace and charm. Among these things A Hill 
from the Town Pump, The Village Uncle, The Toll- Gath- 
erer's Day, the Chippings with a Chisel, may most natu- 
rally be mentioned. As we turn over these volumes we 
feel that the pieces that spring most directl}^ from his 
fancy constitute, as I have said (putting his four novels 
aside), his most substantial claim to our attention. It 
would be a mistake to insist too much upon them ; Haw- 
thorne was himself the first to recognise that. "These 
fitful sketches," he says in the preface to the Mosses from 
an Old Manse, " with so little of external life about them, 
yet claiming no profundity of purpose — so reserved even 
while they sometimes seem so frank — often but half in 
earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfac- 
torily the thoughts which they profess to image — such 
trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary 
reputation." This is very becomingly uttered; but it 
may be said, partly in answer to it, and partly in confir- 
mation, that the valuable element in these things was 
not what Hawthorne put into them consciously, but what 
passed into them without his being able to measure it — 
the element of simple genius, the quality of imagination. 
This is the real charm of Hawthorne's writing — this 
purity and spontaneity and naturalness of fancy. For 
the rest, it is interesting to see how it borrowed a par- 
ticular colour from the other faculties that lay near it 
— how the imagination, in this capital son of the old Pu- 
ritans, reflected the hue of the more purely moral part, 
of the dusky, overshadowed conscience. The conscience, 
by no fault of its own, in every genuine offshoot of that 
sombre lineage, lay under the shadow of the sense of sin. 
This darkening cloud was no essential part of the nature 



fii.] EARLY WRITINGS. 61 

of the individual ; it stood fixed in the general moral 
heaven under which he grew np and looked at life. It 
projected from above, from outside, a black patch over his 
spirit, and it was for him to do what he could with the 
black patch. There were all sorts of possible ways of 
dealing with it; they depended upon the personal tem- 
perament. Some natures would let it lie as it fell, and 
contrive to be tolerably comfortable beneath it. Others 
would groan and sweat and suffer; but the dusky blight 
would remain, and their lives would be lives of misery. 
Here and there an individual, irritated beyond endurance, 
would throw it off in anger, plunging probably into what 
would be deemed deeper abysses of depravity. Haw- 
thorne's way was the best ; for he contrived, by an exqui- 
site process, best known to himself, to transmute this heavy 
moral burden into the very substance of the imagination, 
to make it evaporate in the light and charming fumes of 
artistic production. But Hawthorne, of course, was ex- 
ceptionally fortunate ; he had his genius to help him. 
f Nothing is more curious and interesting than this almost 
exclusively imported character of the sense of sin in Haw- 
thorne's mind ; it seems to exist there merely for an artis- 
tic or literary purpose. He had ample cognizance of the 
Puritan conscience ; it was his natural heritage ; it was re- 
produced in him ; looking into his soul, he found it there. 
But his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectu- 
al ; it was not moral and theological. He played with it, 
arid used it as a pigment ; he treated it, as the metaphy- 
sicians say, objectively. He was not discomposed, dis- 
turbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and regu- 
lar victims, who had not the little postern door of fancy to 
slip through, to the other side of the wall. It was, indeed, 
to his imaginative vision, the great fact of man's nature ; 



68 HAWTHORNE. . [chap. 

-the light element that had been mingled with his own 
composition always clung to this rugged prominence of 
moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers about the 
mountain. It was a necessary condition for a man of 
Hawthorne's stock that if his imagination should take li- 
cense to amuse itself, it should at least select this grim 
precinct of the Puritan morality for its play-ground. He 
speaks of the dark disapproval with which his old ances- 
tors, in the case of their corning to life, would see him 
trifling himself away as a story-teller. But how far more 
darkly would they have frowned could they have under- 
stood that he had converted the very principle of their 
own being into one of his toys ! 

It will be seen that I am far from beino; struck with 
the justice of that view of the author of the Twice -Told 
Tales, which is so happily expressed by the French critic 
to whom I alluded at an earlier stage of this essay. To 
speak of Hawthorne, as M. Emile Montegut does, as a 
romancier pessimiste, seems to me very much beside the 
mark. He is no more a pessimist than an optimist, though 
he is certainly not much of either. He does not pretend 
to conclude, or to have a philosophy of human nature; in- 
deed, I should even say that at bottom he does not take 
human nature as hard as he may seem to do. " His bitter- 
ness," says M. Montegut, "is without abatement, and his 
bad opinion of man is without compensation. . . . His lit- 
tle tales have the air of confessions which the soul makes 
to itself; they are so many little slaps which the author 
applies to our face." This, it seems to me, is to exagger- 
ate almost immeasurably the reach of Hawthorne's relish 
of gloomy subjects. What pleased him in such subjects 
was their picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, 
their chiaroscuro; but they were not the expression of 



Ill] EARLY WRITINGS. 59 

a hopeless, or even of a predominantly melancholy, feel- 
ing about the human soul. Such at least is my own im- 
pression. He is to a considerable degree ironical — this is 
part of his charm^part even, one may say, of his bright- 
ness; but he is neither bitter nor cynical — he is rarely 
even what I should call tragical. There have certainly 
been story - tellers of a gayer and lighter spirit ; there 
have been observers more humorous, more hilarious — 
though on the whole Hawthorne's observation has a smile 
in it oftener than may at first appear ; but there has rare- 
ly been an observer more serene, less agitated by what he 
sees and less disposed to call things deeply into question. 
As I have already intimated, his Note-Books are full of 
this simple and almost childlike serenity. That dusky 
pre -occupation with the misery of human life and the 
wickedness of the human heart v^hich such a critic as 
M. Emile Montegut talks about, is totally absent from 
them ; and if we may suppose a person to have read these 
Diaries before looking into the tales, we may be sure that 
such a reader would be greatly surprised to hear the 
author described as a disappointed, disdainful genius. 
" This marked love of cases of conscience," savs M. Mon- 
tegut; "this taciturn, scornful cast of mind; this habit of 
seeing sin everywhere, and hell always gaping open ; this 
dusky gaze bent always upon a damned world, and a nat- 
ure draped in mourning ; these lonely conversations of the 
imagination w4th the conscience ; this pitiless analysis re- 
sulting from a perpetual examination of one's self, and 
from the tortures of a heart closed before men and open 
to God — all these elements of the Puritan character have 
passed into Mr. Hawthorne, or, to speak more justly, have 
filtered into him, through a long succession of genera- 
tions." This is a very pretty and very vivid account of 
E 



60 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

Hawthorne, superficially considered ; and it is just such a 
view of the case as would commend itself most easily and 
most naturally to a hasty critic. It is all true indeed, with 
a difference ; Hawthorne was all that M. Montegut says, 
minus the conviction. The old Puritan moral sense, the 
consciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our 
responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster 
— these things had been lodged in the mind of a man of 
Fancy, whose fancy had straightway begun to take liber- 
ties and play tricks with them — to judge them (Heaven 
forgive him !) from the poetic and aesthetic point of view, 
the point of view of entertainment and irony. This ab- 
sence of conviction makes the difference ; but the differ- 
ence is great. 

Hawthorne was a man of fancy, and I suppose that, in 
speaking of him, it is inevitable that we should feel our- 
selves confronted with the familiar problem of the dif- 
ference between the fancy and the imagination. Of the 
larger and more potent faculty he certainly possessed a 
liberal share; no one can read The House of the Seven 
Gables without feeling it to be a deeply imaginative work. 
But I am often struck, especially in the shorter tales, of 
which I am now chiefly speaking, with a kind of small 
ingenuity, a taste for conceits and analogies, which bears 
more particularly what is called the fanciful stamp. The 
finer of the shorter tales are redolent of a rich imagination. 

" Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only 
dreamed a wild dream of witch - meeting ? Be it so, if you 
will ; but, alas, it was a dream of evil omen for young Good- 
man Brown ! a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, 
if not a desperate, man, did he become from the night of that 
fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation 
were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an 



HI.] EARLY WRITINGS. 61 

anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all 
the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pul- 
pit, with power and fervid eloquence, and with his hand on 
the open Bible of the sacred truth of our religion, and of 
saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of ftiture bliss or 
misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown grow pale, 
dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray 
blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at 
midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith ; and at morn- 
ing or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he 
scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his 
wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and 
was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an 
aged woman, and children, and grandchildren, a goodly pro- 
cession, besides neighbours not a few, they carved no hopeful 
verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom." 

There is imagination in that, and in many another pas- 
sage that I might quote ; but as a general thing I should 
characterise the more metaphysical of our author's short 
stories as graceful and felicitous conceits. They seem to 
me to be qualified in this manner by the very fact that 
they belong to the province of allegory. Hawthorne, in 
his metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and 
allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises 
of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know, have 
a great stomach for it ; they delight in symbols and cor- 
respondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another 
and a very different story. I frankly confess that I have, 
as a general thing, but little enjoyment of it, and that it 
has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate lit- 
erary form. It has produced assuredly some first-rate 
works; and Hawthorne in his younger years had been a 
great reader and devotee of Bunyan and Spenser, the great 
masters of allegory. But it is apt to spoil two good 



62 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

things — a story and a moral, a meaning and a form ; and 
the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forci- 
ble-feeble writing that has been inflicted upon the world. 
The only cases in which it is endurable is when it is ex- 
tremely spontaneous, when the analogy presents itself with 
eager promptitude. When it shows signs of having been 
groped and fumbled for, the needful illusion is of course 
absent, and the failure complete. Then the machinery 
alone is visible, and the end to which it operates becomes 
a matter of indifference. There was but little literary crit- 
icism in the United States at the time Hawthorne's earlier 
works were published ; but among the reviewers Edgar 
Poe perhaps held the scales the highest. He, at any rate, 
rattled them loudest, and pretended, more than any one 
else, to conduct the weighing -process on scientific princi- 
ples. Very remarkable was this process of Edgar Poe's, 
and very extraordinary were his principles ; but he had the 
advantage of being a man of genius, and his intelligence 
was frequently great. His collection of critical sketches 
of the American writers flourishing in what M. Taine 
would call his milieu and moment, is very curious and 
interesting reading, and it has one quality which ought to 
keep it from ever being completely forgotten. It is prob- 
ably the most complete and exquisite specimen of provin- 
cialism ever prepared for the edification of men. Poe's 
judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar ; but they con- 
tain a great deal of sense and discrimination as well, and 
here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a 
phrase of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most 
fatuous pedantry. He wrote a chapter upon Hawthorne, 
and spoke of him, on the whole, very kindly ; and his es- 
timate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he 
should express lively disapproval of the large part allotted 



III.] EARLY WRITINGS. 63 

to allegory in his tales — in defence of which, he says, 
" however, or for whatever object employed, there is scarce- 
ly one respectable word to be said. . . . The deepest emo- 
tion," he goes on, " aroused within us by the happiest alle- 
gory as allegory, is a very, very imperfectly satisfied sense 
of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we 
should have preferred his not having attempted to over- 
come. . . . One thing is clear, that if allegory ever estab- 
lishes a fact, it is by dint of overturning a fiction ;" and 
Poe has furthermore the courage to remark that the Pil- 
grim's Progress is a " ludicrously overrated book." Cer- 
tainly, as a general thing, we are struck with the ingenuity 
and felicity of Hawthorne's analogies and correspondences; 
the idea appears to have made itself at home in them easi- 
ly. Nothing could be better in this respect than The Snow 
Image (a little masterpiece), or The Great Carbuncle, or 
Doctor Heidegger'' s Experiment, or Pappacini's Daughter. 
But in such thiugs as The Birth-Mark and The Bosom- 
Serpent we are struck with something stiff and mechan- 
ical, slightly incongruous, as if the kernel had not assimi- 
lated its envelope. But these are matters of light impres- 
sion, and there w^ould be a want of tact in pretending to 
discriminate too closely among things which all, in one 
way or another, have a charm. The charm — the great 
charm — is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the 
whole deep mystery of man's soul and conscience. They 
are moral, and their interest is moral ; they deal with some- 
thing more than the mere accidents and conventionalities, 
the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in Haw- 
thorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, 
in his way, he tried to become familiar with it. This nat- 
ural, yet fanciful, familiarity with it ; this air, on the au- 
thor's part, of being a confirmed hahitue of a region of 



64 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

mysteries and subtleties, constitutes the originality of his 
tales. And then they have the further merit of seeming, 
for what they are, to spring up so freely and lightly. The 
author has all the ease, indeed, of a regular dweller in the 
moral, psychological realm ; he goes to and fro in it, as a 
man who knows his way. His treaa is a light and modest 
one, but he keeps the key in his pocket. 

His little historical stories all seem to me admirable ; 
they are so good that you may re-read them many times. 
They are not numerous, and they are very short ; but they 
are fall of a vivid and delightful sense of the New England 
past; they have, moreover, the distinction, little tales of a 
dozen and fifteen pages as they are, of being the only suc- 
cessful attempts at historical fiction that have been made 
in the United States. Hawthorne was at home in the early 
New England history ; he had thumbed its records and he 
had breathed its air, in whatever odd receptacles this some- 
what pungent compound still lurked. He was fond of it, 
and he was proud of it, as any New Englander must be, 
measuring the part of that handful of half-starved fanatics 
who formed his earliest precursors, in laying the founda- 
tions of a mighty empire. Hungry for the picturesque as 
he always was, and not finding any very copious provision 
of it around him, he turned back into the two preceding 
centuries, with the earnest determination that the primitive 
annals of Massachusetts should at least appear picturesque. 
His fancy, which was always alive, played a little with the 
somewhat meagre and angular facts of the colonial period, 
and forthwith converted a great many of them into impres- 
sive legends and pictures. There is a little infusion of col- 
our, a little vagueness about certain details, but it is very 
gracefully and discreetly done, and realities are kept in view 
sufficiently to make us feel that if we are reading romance, 



111.] EARLY WRITINGS. 65 

it is romance tliat rather supplements than contradicts his- 
tory. The early annals of New England were not fertile 
in legend, but Hawthorne laid his hands upon everything 
that would serve his purpose, and in two or three cases his 
version of the story has a great deal of beauty. The Grey 
Champion is a sketch of less than eight pages, bat the little 
figures stand up in the tale as stoutly, at the least, as if 
they were propped up on half-a-dozen chapters by a dryer 
annalist ; and the whole thing has the merit of those cab- 
inet pictures in which the artist has been able to make his 
persons look the size of life. Hawthorne, to say it again, 
was not in the least a realist — he was not to my mind 
enough of one ; but there is no genuine lover of the good 
city of Boston but will feel grateful to him for his cour- 
age in attempting to recount the " traditions " of Washing- 
ton Street, the main thoroughfare of the Puritan capital. 
The four Legends of the Province House are certain shad- 
owy stories which he professes to have gathered in an 
ancient tavern lurking behind the modern shop fronts of 
this part of the city. The Province House disappeared 
some years ago, but while it stood it was pointed to as 
the residence of the Royal Governors of Massachusetts be- 
fore the Revolution. I have no recollection of it ; but it 
cannot have been, even from Hawthorne's account of it — 
which is as pictorial as he ventures to make it — a very im- 
posing piece of antiquity. The writer's charming touch, 
however, throws a rich brown tone over its rather shallow 
venerableness ; and we are beguiled into believing, for in- 
stance, at the close of Howe's Masquerade (a story of a 
strange occurrence at an entertainment given by Sir Wil- 
liam Howe, the last of the Royal Governors, durina: the 
siege of Boston by Washington), that " superstition, among 
other legends of this mansion, repeats the wondrous tale 
4 



66 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture the 
ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide 
through the Province House. And last of all comes a fig- 
ure shrouded in a military cloak, tossing his clenched 
hands into the air, and stamping his iron-shod boots upon 
the freestone steps with a semblance of feverish despair, 
but without the sound of a foot-tramp." Hawthorne had, 
as regards the two earlier centuries of New England life, 
that faculty which is called now-a-days the historic con- 
sciousness. He never sought to exhibit it on a large 
scale ; he exhibited it, indeed, on a scale so minute that we 
must not linger too much upon it. His vision of the past 
was filled with definite images — images none the less defi- 
nite that they were concerned with events as shadowy as 
this dramatic passing away of the last of King George's 
representatives in his long loyal but finally alienated 
colony. 

I have said that Hawthorne had become engaged in 
about his thirty-fifth year; but he was not married until 
1842. Before this event took place he passed through 
two episodes, which (putting his falling in love aside) were 
much the most important things that had yet happened 
to him. They interrupted the painful monotony of his 
life, and brought the affairs of men within his personal 
experience. One of these was, moreover, in itself a curious 
and interesting chapter of observation, and it fructified, 
in Hawthorne's memory, in one of his best productions. 
How urgently he needed at this time to be drawn within 
the circle of social accidents, a little anecdote related by 
Mr. Lathrop in connection with his first acquaintance with 
the young lady he was to marry, may serve as an example. 
This young lady became known to him through her sis- 
ter, who had first approached him as an admirer of the 



ni.] EARLY WRITINGS. 67 

Twice-Told Tales (as to the authorship of which she had 
been so much in the dark as to have attributed it first, 
conjecturally, to one of the two Miss Hathornes) ; and the 
two Miss Peabodys, desiring to see more of the charming 
writer, caused him to be invited to a species of conver- 
sazione at the house of one of their friends, at which they 
themselv^es took care to be punctual. Several other ladies, 
however, were as punctual as they, and Hawthorne pres- 
ently arriving, and seeing a bevy of admirers where he 
had expected but three or four, fell into a state of agita- 
tion, which is vividly described by his biographer. He 
" stood perfectly motionless, but with the look of a sylvan 
creature on the point of fleeing away. . . . He was stricken 
with dismay ; his face lost colour and took on a warm 
paleness, , . . his agitation was very great ; he stood by 
a table, and, taking up some small object that lay upon it, 
he found his hand trembling so that he was obliged to 
lay it down." It was desirable, certainly, that something 
should occur to break the spell of a diffidence that might 
justly be called morbid. There is another little sentence 
dropped by Mr. Lathrop in relation to this period of Haw- 
thorne's life, which appears to me worth quoting, though 
I ani.by no means sure that it will seem so to the reader. 
It has a very simple and innocent air, but to a person not 
without an impression of the early days of "culture"" in 
Xew England it will be pregnant with historic meaning. 
The elder Miss Peabody, who afterwards was Hawthorne's 
sister-in-law, and who acquired later in life a very honour- 
able American fame as a woman of benevolence, of learn- 
ing, and of literary accomplishment, had invited the Miss 
Hathornes to come to her house for the evening, and to 
bring with them their brother, whom she wished to thank 
for his beautiful tales. " Entirely to her surprise," says 



68 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

Mr. Lathrop, completing thereby his picture of the atti- 
tude of this remarkable family toward society — " entirely 
to her surprise they came. She herself opened the door, 
and there, before her, between his sisters, stood a splen- 
didly handsome youth, tall and strong, with no appearance 
whatever of timidity, but instead an almost fierce deter- 
mination making his face stern. This was his resource 
for carrving off the extreme inward tremor which he 
really felt. His hostess brought out Flaxman's designs 
for Dante, just received from Professor Felton, of Harvard, 
and the party made an evening's entertainment out of 
them." This last sentence is the one I allude to ; and 
were it not for fear of appearing too fanciful, I should say 
that these few words were, to the initiated mind, an un- 
conscious expression of the lonely frigidity which charac- 
terised most attempts at social recreation in the New Eng- 
land world some forty years ago. There was at that time 
a great desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, 
in art, in aesthetics, together with a very scanty supply of 
the materials for such pursuits. Small things were made 
to do large service ; and there is something even touching 
in the solemnity of consideration that was bestowed by 
the emancipated New England conscience upon little wan- 
dering books and prints, little echoes and rumours of ob- 
servation and experience. There flourished at that time 
in Boston a very remarkable and interesting woman, of 
whom we shall have more to say, Miss Margaret Fuller by 
name. This lady vvas the apostle of culture, of intellectual 
curiosity; and in the peculiarly interesting account of her 
life, published in 1852 by Emerson and two other of her 
friends, there are pages of her letters and diaries which 
narrate her visits to the Boston Athenaeum, and the emo- 
tions aroused in her mind by turning over portfolios of 



III.] EARLY WRITINGS. 6^ 

engravings. These emotions were ardent and passionate 
— could hardly have been more so had she been prostrate 
with contemplation in the Sistine Chapel or in one of the 
chambers of the Pitti Palace. The only analogy I can 
recall to this earnestness of interest in great works of 
art at a distance from them, is furnished by the great 
Goethe's elaborate study of plaster-casts and pencil-draw- 
ings at Weimar. I mention Margaret Fuller here because 
a glimpse of her state of mind — her vivacity of desire and 
poverty of knowledge — helps to define the situation. The 
situation lives for a moment in those few words of Mr. 
Lathrop's. The initiated mind, as I have ventured to call 
it, has a vision of a little unadorned parlour, with the 
snow-drifts of a Massachusetts winter piled up about its 
windows, and a group of sensitive and serious people, mod- 
est -votaries of opportunity, fixing their eyes upon a book- 
ful of Flaxman's attenuated outlines. 

At the beginning of the year 1839 he received, through 
political interest, an appointment as weigher and ganger 
in the Boston Custom-house. Mr. Van Buren then occu- 
pied the Presidency, and it appears that the Democratic 
party, whose successful candidate he had been, rather took 
credit for the patronage it had bestowed upon literary 
men. Hawthorne was a Democrat, and apparently a zeal- 
ous one ; even in later years, after the Whigs had vivified 
their principles by the adoption of the Republican plat- 
form, and by taking up an honest attitude on the question 
of slavery, his political faith never wavered. His Demo- 
cratic sympathies were eminently natural, and there would 
have been an incongruity in his belonging to the other 
party. He was not only by conviction, but personally 
and by association, a Democrat. When in later years he 
found himself in contact with European civilization, he 



'70 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

appears to have become conscious of a good deal of latent 
radicalism in his disposition ; he was oppressed with the 
burden of antiquity in Europe, and he found himself sigh- 
ing for lightness and freshness and facility of change. 
But these things are relative to the point of view, and in 
his own country Hawthorne cast his lot with the party of 
conservatism, the party opposed to change and freshness. 
The people who found something musty and mouldy in 
his literary productions would have regarded this quite 
as a matter of course ; but we are not obliged to use 
invidious epithets in describing his political preferences. 
The sentiment that attached him to the Democracy was a 
subtle and honourable one, and the author of an attempt 
to sketch a portrait of him should be the last to complain 
of this adjustment of his sympathies. It falls much more 
smoothly into his reader's conception of him than ^any 
other would do; and if he had had the perversity to be 
a Republican, I am afraid our ingenuity would have been 
considerably taxed in devising a proper explanation of the 
circumstance. At any rate, the Democrats gave him a 
small post in the Boston Custom-house, to which an an- 
nual salary of $1,200 was attached, and Hawthorne ap- 
pears at first to have joyously welcomed the gift. The 
duties of the oiRce were not very congruous to the genius 
of a man of fancy ; but it had the advantage that it broke 
the spell of his cursed solitude, as he called it, drew him 
away from Salem, and threw him, comparatively speaking, 
into the world. The first volume of the American Note- 
Books contains some extracts from letters written during his 
tenure of this modest office, which indicate sufficiently that 
his occupations cannot have been intrinsically gratifying. 

"I have been measuring coal all day," he writes, during 



III.] EARLY WRITINGS. 11 

the winter of 1840, '' on board of a black little British 
schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. 
Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm ; 
for the wind (north-east, I believe) blew up through the 
dock as if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. Tlie 
vessel lying deep between two wharves, there was no more 
delightful prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than 
the posts and timbers, half immersed in the water and cov- 
ered with ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides 
had left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles. 
Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off, 
appeared the Bunker's Hill Monument, and, what interested 
me considerably, more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a 
clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march 
of the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty 
little cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot 
stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and 
innumerable lumber of all sorts — my olfactories meanwhile 
being greatly refreshed with the odour of a pipe, which the 
captain, or some one of his crew, was smoking. But at last 
came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light 
upon the islands; and I blessed it, because it was the signal 
of my release." 

A worse man than Hawthorne would have measured 
coal quite as well; and of all the dismal tasks to which an 
unreraunerated imagination has ever had to accommodate 
itself, I remember none more sordid than the business 
depicted in the foregoing lines. " I pray," he writes, 
some weeks later, " that in one year more I may find 
some way of escaping from this unblest Custom-house; 
for it is a very grievous thraldom. I do detest all offices ; 
all, at least, that are held on a political tenure, and I want 
nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, 
and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned 



1% HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and 
which will stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have 
gained by my Custom-house experience — to know a poli- 
tician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought or 
power of sympathy could have taught me ; because the 
animal, or the machine, rather, is not in nature." A few 
davs later he ffoes on in the same strain : — 

" I do not think it is the doom laid upon me of murdering 
so many of the brightest hours of the day at the Custom- 
house that makes such havoc with my wits, for liere I am 
again trying to write worthily, . . . yet with a sense as if all 
the noblest part of man had been left out of^my composition, 
or had decayed out of it since my nature was given to my 
own keeping. . . . Never comes any bird of Paradise into 
that dismal region. A salt or even a coal-ship is ten mill- 
ion times preferable ; for there the sky is above me, and the 
fresh breeze around me ; and my thoughts, having hardly 
anything to do with my occupation, are as free as air. Nev- 
ertheless ... it is only once in a while that the image and 
desire of a better and happier life makes me feel the iron of 
my chain ; for after all a human spirit may find no insuffi- 
ciency of food for it, even in the Custom-house. And with 
such materials as these I do think and feel and learn things 
that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless 
I had learned them there ; so that the present position of my 
life shall not be quite left out of the sum of my real exist- 
ence. ... It is good for me, on many accounts, that my life 
has had this passage in it. I know much more than I did a 
year ago. I have a stronger sense of power to act as a man 
among men. I have gained worldly wisdom, and wisdom, 
also, that is not altogether of this world. And when I quit 
this earthly career where I am now buried, nothing will cling 
to me that ought to be left behind. Men will not perceive, I 
trust, by my look, or the tenor of my thoughts and feelings, 
that I have been a Custom-house officer." 



III.] EARLY WRITINGS. IS 

He says, writing shortly afterwards, that " w^lien I shall 
be free again, I will enjoy all things with the fresh sim- 
plicity of a child of five years old. I shall grow young 
again, made all over anew. I will go forth and stand in 
a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has col- 
lected on me shall be washed away at once, and my heart 
will be like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest 
upon." 

This forecast of his destiny was sufficiently exact. A 
year later, in April, 1841, he went to take up his abode 
in the socialistic community of Brook Farm. Here he 
found himself aiilong fields and flowers and other natural 
products, as well as among many products that could not 
very justly be called natural. He was exposed to summer 
showers in plenty ; and his personal associations were as 
different as possible from those he had encountered in fis- 
cal circles. He made acquaintance with Transcendental- 
ism and the Transcendentalists. 
4* 



CHAPTER ly. 



BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 



The history of the little industrial and intellectual asso- 
ciation which formed itself at this time in one of the sub- 
urbs of Boston has not, to my knowledge, been written ; 
though it is assuredly a curious and interesting chapter 
in the domestic annals of New England. It would, of 
course, be easy to overrate the importance of this ingen- 
ious attempt of a few speculative persons to improve the 
outlook of mankind. The experiment came and went 
very rapidly and quietly, leaving very few traces behind 
it. It became simply a charming personal reminiscence 
for the small number of amiable enthusiasts who had had 
a hand in it. There were degrees of enthusiasm, and I 
suppose there were degrees of amiability; but a certain 
generous brightness of hope and freshness of conviction 
pervaded the whole undertaking, and rendered it, morally 
speaking, important to an extent of which any heed that 
the world in general ever gave to it is an insufficient meas- 
ure. Of course it would be a great mistake to represent 
the episode of Brook Farm as directly related to the man- 
ners and morals of the New England world in general — 
and in especial to those of the prosperous, opulent, com- 
fortable part of it. The thing was the experiment of a 
coterie — it was unusual, unfashionable, unsuccessful. It 



CHAP. IV.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 75 

was, as would then have been said, an amusement of the 
Tran.scendentalists — a harmless effusion of Radicalism. 
The Transcendentalists were not, after all, very numerous, 
and the Radicals were by no means of the vivid tinge of 
those of our own day. I have said that the Brook Farm 
community left no traces behind it that the world in gen- 
eral can appreciate ; I should rather say that the only trace 
is a short novel, of which the principal merits reside in its 
qualities of difference from the affair itself. The Blithe- 
dale Romance is the main result of Brook Farm ; but The 
Blithedale Romance was, very properly, never recognised 
by the Brook Farmers as an accurate portrait of their 
little colony. 

Nevertheless, in a society as to which the more frequent 
complaint is that it is monotonous, that it lacks variety of 
incident and of type, the episode, our own business" with 
which is simply that it was the cause of Hawthorne's writ- 
ing an admirable tale, might be welcomed as a picturesque 
variation. At the same time, if we do not exaggerate its 
proportions, it may seem to contain a fund of illustration 
as to that phase of human life with which our author's 
own history mingled itself. The most graceful account of 
the origin of Brook Farm is probably to be found in these 
words of one of the biographers of Margaret Fuller : '" In 
Boston and its vicinity, several friends, for whose character 
Margaret felt the highest honour, were earnestly consid- 
ering the possibility of making such industrial, social, and 
educational arrangements as would simplify economies, 
combine leisure for study with healthful and honest toil, 
avert unjust collisions of caste, equalise refinements, awaken 
generous affections, diffuse courtesy, and sweeten and sanc- 
tify life as a whole." The reader will perceive that this 

was a liberal scheme, and that if the experiment failed, the 
F 



76 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

greater was the pity. The writer goes on to say that a 
gentleman, who afterwards distinguished himself in litera- 
tm^e (he had begun by being a clergyman), "convinced by 
his experience in a faithful ministry that the need was ur- 
gent for a thorough application of the professed principles 
of Frateinitv to actual relations, was about stakino-.his all 
of fortune, reputation, and influence in an attempt to organ- 
ise a joint-stock company a^ Brook Farm." As Margaret 
Fuller passes for having suggested to Hawthorne the figure 
of Zenobia in The BUthedale Romance, and as she is prob- 
ably, with one exception, the person connected with the 
affair who, after Hawthorne, offered most of wliat is called 
a personality to the w^orld, I may venture to quote a few 
more passages from her Memoirs — a curious, in some points 
of view almost a grotesque, and yet, on the whole, as I have 
said, an extremely interesting book. It was a strange his- 
tory and a strange destiny, that of this brilliant, restless, 
and unhappy woman — this ardent New Englander, this 
impassioned Yankee, who occupied so large a place in the 
thoughts, the lives, the affections, of an intelligent and ap- 
preciative society, and yet left behind her nothing but the 
memory of a memory. Her function, her reputation, were 
singular, and not altogether reassuring: she was a talker; 
she was the talker; she was the genius of talk. She had a 
magnificent, though by no means an unmitigated, egotism ; 
and in some of her utterances it is difiicult to say whether 
pride or humility prevails — as, for instance, when she wi'ites 
that she feels "that there is plenty of room in the Universe 
for my faults, and as if I could not spend time in thinking 
of them when so many things interest me more." She 
has left the same sort of reputation as a great actress. 
Some of her writing: has extreme beauty, almost all of it 
has a real interest ; but her value, her activity, her sway (I 



IV.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 77 

am not sure that one can say her charm), were personal and 
practical. She went to Europe, expanded to new desires 
and interests, and, very poor herself, married an impover- 
ished Italian nobleman. Then, with her husband and child, 
she embarked to return to her own country, and was lost 
at sea in a terrible storm, within sight of its coasts. Her 
tragical death combined with many of the elements of her 
life to convert her memory into a sort of legend, so that 
the people who had known her well grew at last to be en- 
vied by later comers. Hawthorne does not appear to have 
been intimate with her; on the contrary, I find such an 
entry as this in the American Note-Books in 1841 : "I was 
invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday, with Miss Mar- 
garet Fuller; but Providence had given me some business 
to do; for which I was very thankful!" It is true that, 
later, the lady is the subject of one or two allusions of a 
gentler cast. One of them, indeed, is so pretty as to be 
worth quoting : — 

"After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson's, I returned 
through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived 
a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. 
It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole after- 
noon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand, 
with some strange title which I did not understand and have 
forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and 
was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of 
Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow^ when we saw a group 
of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them fol- 
lowed a path which led them away from us; but an old man 
passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the 
ground and me standing by her side. He made some remark 
upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into 
the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, 
and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about 



18 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

the crows, whose voices Margaret had heard ; and about the 
experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon 
the character after the recollection of them has passed away; 
and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the 
view from their summits; and about other matters of high 
and low philosophy." 

It is safe to assume that Hawthorne could not, on the 
whole, have had a high relish for the very positive person- 
ality of this accomplished and argumentative woman, in 
whose intellect high noon seemed ever to reign, as twilight 
did in his own. He must have been struck with the glare 
of her understanding, and, mentally speaking, have scowled 
and blinked a good deal in conversation with her. But it 
is tolerably manifest, nevertheless, that she was, in his im- 
agination, the starting-point of the figure of Zenobia ; and 
Zenobia is, to my sense, his only very definite attempt at 
the representation of a character. The portrait is full of 
alteration and embellishment ; but it has a greater reality, 
a greater abundance of detail, than any of his other fig- 
ures;, and the reality was a memory of the lady whom he 
had encountered in the Roxbury pastoral or among the 
wood-walks of Concord, with strange books in her hand 
and eloquent discourse on her lips. The Blithedale Ro- 
mance was written just after her unhappy death, when the 
reverberation of her talk wonld lose much of its harsh- 
ness. In fact, however, very much the same qualities that 
made Hawthorne a Democi'at in politics — his contempla- 
tive turn and absence of a keen peiception of abuses, his 
taste for old ideals, and loitering paces, and muifled tones 
—would operate to keep him out of active sympathy with 
a woman of the so-called progressive type. We may be 
sure that in women his taste was conservative. 

It seems odd, as his biographer says, " that the least 



IT.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. T9 

gregarious of men should have been drawn into a social- 
istic community ;" but although it is apparent that Haw- 
thorne went to Brook Farm without any great Transcen- 
dental fervour, yet he had various good reasons for cast- 
ing his lot in this would-be happy family. He was as yet 
unable to marry, but he naturally wished to do so as speed- 
ily as possible, and there was a prospect that Brook Farm 
would prove an economical residence. And then it is only 
fair to believe that Hawthorne was interested in the ex- 
periment ; and that, though he was not a Transcendental- 
ist, an Abolitionist, or a Fourierite, as his companions were 
in some degree or other likely to be, he was willing, as a 
generous and unoccupied young man, to lend a hand in 
any reasonable scheme for helping people to live together 
on better terms than the common. The Brook Farm 
scheme was, as such things go, a reasonable one ; it was 
devised and carried out by shrewd and sober-minded New 
Englanders, who were careful to place economy first and 
idealism afterwards, and who w^ere not afflicted with a 
Gallic passion for completeness of theory. There were 
no formulas, doctrines, dogmas ; there was no interference 
whatever with private life or individual habits, and not the 
faintest adumbration of a rearrangement of that difficult 
business known as the relations of the sexes. The rela- 
tions of the sexes were neither more nor less than what 
they usually are in American life, excellent ; and in such 
particulars the scheme was thoroughly conservative and ir- 
reproachable. Its main characteristic was that each indi- 
vidual concerned in it should do a part of the work nec- 
essary for keeping the whole machine going. He could 
choose his work, and he could live as he liked ; it was 
hoped, but it was by no means demanded, that he would 
make himself agreeable, like a gentleman invited to a din- 



80 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

ner-party. Allowing, hovever, for everything that was a 
concession to worldly traditions and to the laxity of man's 
nature, there must have been in the entei-prise a good deal 
of a certain freshness and purity of spirit, of a certain no- 
ble credulity and faith in the perfectibility of man, which 
it would have been easier to find in Boston in the year 
1840, than in London five-and-thirty years later. If that 
was the era of Transcendentalism, Transcendentalism could 
only have sprouted in the soil peculiar to the general lo- 
cality of which I speak — the soil of the old New England 
morality, gently raked and refreshed by an imported cult- 
ure. The Transcendentalists read a great deal of French 
and German, made themselves intimate with George Sand 
and Goethe, and many other writers ; but the strong and 
deep New England conscience accompanied them on all 
their intellectual excursions, and there never was a so- 
called "movement" that embodied itself, on the whole, in 
fewer eccentricities of conduct, or that borrowed a smaller 
license in private deportment. Henry Thoreau, a delight- 
ful writer, went to live in the woods; but Henry Thoreau 
was essentially a sylvan personage, and would not have 
been, however the fashion of his time might have turned, a 
man about town. The brothers and sisters at Brook Farm 
ploughed the fields and milked the cows ; but I think that 
an observer from another clime and society would have 
been much more struck with their spirit of conformity 
than with their dereglements. Their ardour was a moral 
ardour, and the lightest breath of scandal never rested 
upon them, or upon any phase of Transcendentalism. 

A biographer of Hawthorne might well regret that his 
hero had not been more mixed up with the reforming 
and free-thinking class, so that he might find a pretext 
for writing a chapter upon the state of Boston society 



iv.l, BROOK FARM AND CONCOJ 

forty years ago. A! .KlCu't'ul warrant for such regret 
be, properly, that the biographer's own personal reui. 
cences shiHild stretch back to that period and to the per- 
sons who animated it. This would be a guarantee of ful- 
ness of knowledge and, presumably, of kindness of tone. 
It is difficnlt to see, indeed, how the generation of which 
Hawthorne has given us, in Bllthedale, a few^ portraits, 
should not, at this time of day, be spoken of very tender- 
ly and sympathetically. If irony enter into the allusion, it 
should be of the lightest and gentlest. Certainly, for a brief 
and imperfect chronicler of these things, a writer just touch- 
ing them as he passes, and who has not the advantage of 
having been a contemporary, there is only one possible tone. 
The compiler of these pages, though his recollections date 
only from a later period, has a memory of a certain num- 
ber of persons who had been intimately connected, as Haw- 
thorne was not, with the agitations of that interesting time. 
Something of its interest adhered to them still — something 
of its aroma clung to their garments; there was some- 
thing about them which seemed to say that when they were 
young and enthnsiastic, they had been initiated into moral 
mysteries, they had played at a wonderful game. Their 
usual mark (it is true I can think of exceptions) was that 
they seemed excellently good. They appeared unstained 
by the world, unfamiliar with worldly desires and stand- 
ards, and with those various forms of human depravity 
which flourish in some high phases of civilization ; in- 
clined to simple and democratic ways, destitute of preten- 
sions and affectations, of jealousies, of cynicisms, of snob- 
bishness. This little epoch of fermentation has three or 
four drawbacks for the critics — drawbacks, however, that 
may be overlooked by a person for whom it has an interest 
of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp of provin- 



HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

, it was a beginni'ng vvitlio'at^.frcitlcn, a dawn with- 
a noon ; and it produced, with a single exception, no 
great talents. It produced a great deal of writing, but (al- 
ways putting Hawthorne aside, as a contemporary but not 
a sharer) only one writer in whom the world at large has 
interested itself. The situation was summed up and trans- 
figured in the admirable and exquisite Emerson. He ex- 
pressed all that it contained, and a good deal more, doubt- 
less, besides ; he was the man of genius of the moment ; 
he was the Transcendentalist 'par excellence. Emerson ex- 
pressed, before all things, as was extremely natural at the 
hour and in the place, the value and importance of the in- 
dividual, the duty of making the most of one's self, of liv- 
ing by one's own personal light, and carrying out one's 
own disposition. He reflected with beautiful irony upon 
the exquisite impudence of those institutions which claim 
to have appropriated the truth and to dole it out, in propor- 
tionate morsels, in exchange for a subscription. He talked 
about the beauty and dignity of life, and about every one 
who is born into the world being born to the whole, having 
an interest and a stake in the whole. He said " all that 
is clearly due to-day is not to lie," and a great many other 
things which it would be still easier to present in a ridic- 
ulous light. He insisted upon sincerity and independence 
and spontaneity, upon acting in harmony with one's nat- 
ure, and not conforming and compromising for the sake 
of being more comfortable. He urged thnt a man should 
await his call, his finding the thing to do which he should 
really believe in doing, and not be urged by the world's 
opinion to do simply the world's work. " If no call should 
come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want of 
the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence. . . . 
If I cannot work, at least I need not lie." The doctrine 



IT.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 83 

of the supremacy of the individual to himself, of his orig- 
inality, and, as regards his own character, unique quality, 
must have had a great charm for people living in a socie- 
ty in w^hich introspection — thanks to the want of other en- 
tertainment — played almost the part of a social resource. 

In the United States, in those days, there were no great 
things to look out at (save forests and rivers) ; life was 
not in the least spectacular ; society was not brilliant ; 
the country was given up to a great material prosperity, a 
homely bourgeois activity, a diffusion of primary education 
and the common luxuries. There w^as, therefore, among 
the. cultivated classes, much relish for the utterances of a 
writer who would help one to take a picturesque view of 
one's internal responsibilities, and to find in the landscape 
of the soul all sorts of fine sunrise and moonlight effects. 
" Meantime, while the doors of the temple stand open, 
night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this 
truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition ; 
this, namely — it is an intuition. It cannot be received at 
second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction but 
provocation that I can receive from another soul." To 
make one's self so much more interesting would help to 
make life interesting, and life was probably, to many of 
this aspiring congregation, a dream of freedom and forti- 
tude. There were faulty parts in the Emersonian philoso- 
phy ; but the general tone was magnificent ; and I can ea- 
sily believe that, coming when it did and where it did, it 
should have been drunk in by a great many fine moral ap- 
petites with a sense of intoxication. One envies, even, I 
will not say the illusions, of that keenly sentient period, 
but the convictions and interests — the moral passion. One 
certainly envies the privilege of having heard the finest of 
Emerson's orations poured forth in their early newness. 



84 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

They were the most poetical, the most beautiful produc- 
tions of the American mind, and they were thoroughly 
local and national. They had a music and" a magic, and 
when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, 
the beautiful modulation of his utterance, one regrets in 
especial that one might not have been present on a certain 
occasion which made a sensation, an era — the delivery of 
an address to the Divinity School of Harvard University, 
on a summer evening in 1838. In the light, fresh Amer- 
ican air, unthickened and undarkened by customs and in- 
stitutions established, these things, as the phrase is, told. 

Ilav^^thorne appears, like his own Miles Coverdale, to 
have arrived at Brook Farm in the midst of one of those 
April snow-storms which, during the New England spring, 
occasionally diversify the inaction of the vernal process. 
Miles Coverdale, in The Blithedale Romance, is evidently 
as much Hawthorne as he is any one else in particular. 
He is, indeed, not very markedly any one, unless it be the 
spectator, the observer; his chief identity lies in his suc- 
cess in looking at things objectively, and spinning uncom- 
municated fancies about them. This, indeed, was the part 
that Hawthorne played socially in the little community at 
West Roxbury. His biographer describes him as sitting 
" silently, hour after hour, in the broad, old-fashioned hall 
of the house, where he could listen almost unseen to the 
chat and merriment of the young people, himself almost 
always holding a book before him, but seldom turning the 
leaves." He put his hand to the plough, and supported 
himself and the community, as they were all supposed to 
do, by his labour; but he contributed little to the hum of 
voices. Some of his companions, either then or after- 
wards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his want 
of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to 



TV.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 85 

the place as a sort of»intellectiial vampire, for purely psy- 
chological purposes. He sat in a comer, tliey declared, 
and watched the inmates when the}' were off their o-nard, 
analysing their characters, and dissecting the amiable ar- 
dour, the magnanimous illusions, which he was too cold- 
blooded to share. In so far as this account of JIawthorne's 
attitude was a complaint, it was a singularly childish one. 
If he was at Brook Farm without being of it, this is a very 
fortunate circumstance from the point of view of poster- 
ity, who would have preserved but a slender memory of 
the affair if our author's fine novel had not kept the topic 
open. The complaint is, indeed, almost so ungrateful a 
one as to make us regret that the author's fellow-commu- 
nists came off so easily. They certainly would not have 
done so if the author of Blithedale had been inoi'c of a 
satirist. Certainly, if Hawthorne was an observer, he was 
a very harmless one; and when one thinks of the queer 
specimens of the reforming genus with which he must 
have been surrounded, one almost wishes that, for our en- 
tertainment, he had given his old companions something 
to complain of in earnest. There is no satire whatever in 
the Romance; the quality is almost conspicuous by its 
absence. Of portraits there are only two ; there is no 
sketching of odd figures — no reproduction of strange types 
of radicalism ; the human background is left vague. Haw- 
thorne was not a satirist, and if at Brook Farm he was, 
according to his habit, a good deal of a mild sceptic, his 
scepticism was exercised much more in the interest of 
fancy than in tliat of reality. 

There must have been something pleasantly bucolic and 
pastoral in the habits of the place during the fine Xew 
England summer; but we have no retrospective envy of 
the denizens of Brook Farm in that other season wliich,as 



86 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

Hawthorne somewhere says, leaves^ in those regions " so 
large a blank — so melancholy a death-spot — in lives so 
brief that they ought to be all summer-time." " Of a sum- 
mer night, when the moon was full," says Mr. Lathrop, 
" they lit no lamps, but sat grouped in the light and shad- 
ow, while sundry of the younger men sang old ballads, or 
joined Tom Moore's songs to operatic airs. On other 
nights there would be an original essay or poem read 
aloud, or else a play of Shakspeare, with the parts distrib- 
uted to different members; and these amusements failing, 
some interesting discussion was likely to take their place. 
Occasion all 3^, in the dramatic season, large delegations 
from the farm would drive into Boston, in carriages and 
wagons, to the opera or the play. Sometimes, too, the 
young women sang as they washed the dishes in the Hive ; 
and the youthful yeomen of the society came in and help- 
ed them with their work. The men wore blouses of a 
checked or plaided stuff, belted at the waist, with a broad 
collar folding down about the throat, and rough straw 
hats; the women, usually, simple calico gowns and hats." 
All this sounds delightfully Arcadian and innocent, and it 
is certain that there was something peculiar to the clime 
and race in some of the features of such a life ; in the 
free, frank, and stainless companionship of young men and 
maidens, in the mixture of manual labour and intellectual 
flights — dish-washing and aesthetics, wood -chopping and 
philosophy. Wordsworth's "plain living and high think- 
ing" were made actual. Some passages in Margaret Ful- 
ler's journals throw plenty of light on this. (It must be 
premised that she was at Brook Farm as an occasional 
visitor ; not as a labourer in the Hive.) 

" All Saturday I was off in the woods. In the evening we 



IV.] BROOK l^ARM AND CONCORD. 87 

had a general conversation, opened by me, upon Education, 
in its largest sense, and on wbat we can do for ourselves and 
others. I took my usual ground : — The aim is perfection ; 
patience the road. Our lives should be considered as a ten- 
dency, an approximation only, . . . Mr. R. spoke admirably 
on the nature of loyalty. The people showed a good deal 
of the sans-culotte tendency in their manners, throwing them- 
selves on the floor, yawning, and going out when they had 
heard enough. Yet, as the majority differ with me, to begin 
with — that being the reason this subject was chosen — they 
showed, on the whole, more interest and deference than I 
had expected. As I am accustomed to deference, however, 
and need it for the boldness and animation which my part 
requires, I did not speak with as much force as usual. . . . 
Sunday. — ^A glorious day; the woods full of perfume; I was 
out all the morning. In the afternoon Mrs. R. and I had a 
talk. I said my position would be too uncertain here, as I 

could not work. said ' they would all like to work for 

a person of genius.' . . . ' Yes,' I told her; 'but where would 
be my repose when they were always to be judging whether 
I was worth it or not ? . . . Each day you must prove your- 
self anew.' . . . We talked of the principles of the commu- 
nity. I said I had not a riglit to come, because all the con- 
fidence I had in it was an experiment worth tiying, and that 
it was part of the great wave of inspired thought. . . . We 
had valuable discussion on these points. All Monday morn- 
ing in the woods again. Afternoon, out with the drawing 
party ; I felt the evils of the want of conventional refinement, 
in the impudence with w^hich one of the girls treated me. 
She has since thought of it with regret, I notice ; and by 
every day's observation of me will see that she ought not 
to have done it. In the evening a husking in the barn , . . 
a most picturesque scene. ... I stayed and helped about 
half an hour, and then took a long walk beneath the stars. 
Wednesday. ... In the evening a conversation on Impulse. . . . 
I defended nature, as I always do; — the spirit ascending 



88 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

tliroiigli, not superseding, nature. But in the scale of Sense, 
Intellect, Spirit, I advocated the claims of Intellect, because 
those present were rather disposed to postpone them. On 

tlie nature of Beauty we had good talk. seemed in a 

much more revei'ent humour than the other night, and en- 
joyed the large plans of the universe which were unrolled. . . . 
Saturday. — Well, good-bye. Brook Farm. I know more 
about this place tlian I did when I came; but the only way 
to be qualified for a judge of such an experiment would be 
to become an active, though unimpassioned, associate in try- 
ing it. . . . The girl who was so rude to me stood waiting, 
with a timid air, to bid me good-bye." 

The young girl in question cannot have been Haw- 
thorne's charming Priscilla ; nor yet another young lady, 
of a most humble spirit, who communicated to Margaret's 
biographers her recollections of this remarkable woman's 
visits to Brook Farm ; concluding with the assurance that 
" after a wdiile she seemed to lose sight of my more prom- 
inent and disagreeable peculiarities, and treated me with 
affectionate regard." 

Hawthorne's farewell to the place appears to have been 
accompanied with some reflections of a cast similar to 
those indicated by Miss Fuller; in so far, at least, as jwe 
may attribute to Hawthorne himself some of the observa- 
tions that he fathers upon Miles Coverdale. His biogra- 
pher justly quotes two or three sentences from The Blithe- 
dale Romance, as strikino- the note of the author's feelihof 
about the place. " No sagacious man," says Coverdale, 
" will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among 
reformers and progressive people, without periodically re- 
turning to the settled system of things, to cOsrect himself 
by a new observation from that old standpoint." And he 
remarks elsewhere, that "it struck me as rather odd that 



IV.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 89 

one of the first questions raised, after our separation from 
the greedy, struo-o-ling, self-seeking world, should relate to 
the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside 
barbarians in their own field of labour. But to tell the 
truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society 
at large, we stood in a- position of new hostility rather than 
new brotherhood." IL' was doubtless oppressed' by the 
" sultry heat of society," as he calls it in one of the jot- 
tings in the Note-Books. " What would a man do if he 
were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of socie- 
ty^ and could never batlie himself in cool ^solitude ?" His 
biographer relates that one of the other Brook Farmers, 
wandering afield one summer's day, discovered Hawthorne 
stretched at his length upon a grassy hill-side, with his hat 
pulled over his face, and every appearance, in his attitude, 
of the desire to escape detection. On his asking him 
Avhether he had any particular reason for this shyness of 
posture — " Too much of a party up there !" Hawthorne 
contented himself with replying, with a nod in the direc- 
tion of the Hive. He had, nevertheless, for a time looked 
forward to remaining indefinitely in the community; he 
meant to marry as sooii as possible, and bring his wife 
there to live. Some sixty pages of the second volume of 
the American Note-Books are occupied with extracts from 
his letters to his future wife and from his journal (which 
appears, however, at this time to have been only intermit- 
tent), consisting almost exclusively of descriptions of the 
simple scenery of the neighbourhood, and of the state of 
the Avoods, and fields, and weather. Hawthorne's fond- 
ness for all the common things of nature was deep and 
constant, and there is always something charming in his 
verbal touch, as we may call it, when he talks to himself 
about them. " Oh," he breaks out, of an October after- 
5 



90 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

noon, " the beauty of grassy slopes, and the hollow ways 
of paths winding between hills, and the intervals between 
the road and wood-lots, where Summer lingers and sits 
down, strewing dandelions of gold and blue asters as her 
parting gifts and memorials !" He was but a single sum- 
mer at Brook Farm ; the rest of his residence had the win- 
ter-quality. 

But if he returned to solitude, it was henceforth to be, 
as the French say, a solitude a deux. He was married in 
July, 1842, and betook himself immediately to the ancient 
village of Concoinl, near Boston, where he occupied the s©- 
called Manse which has given the title to one of his collec- 
tions of tales, and upon which this work, in turn, has con- 
ferred a permanent distinction. I use the epithets "an- 
cient" and "near" in the foregoing sentence, according to 
the American measurement of time and distance. Con- 
cord is some twenty miles from Boston ; and even to-day, 
upwards of forty years after the date of Hawthorne's re- 
moval thither, it is a very fresh and well-preserved look- 
ing town. It had already a local history when, a hundred 
years ago, the larger current of human affairs flowed for a 
moment around it. Concord has the honour of being the 
first spot in which blood was shed in the war of the Rev- 
olution ; here occurred the first exchange of musket-shots 
between the King's troops and the American insurgents. 
Here — as Emerson says in the little hymn which he con- 
tributed, in 1836, to the dedication of a small monument 
commemorating this circumstance — 

" Here once the embattled farmers stood, 

And fired the shot heard round the world." 

The b/iwle was a stiiall one, and the farmers were not des- 
tined, individually, to emerge from obscurity ; but the mem- 



I. J BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 91 

ory of these things has kept the reputation of Concord 
green, and it has been watered, moreover, so to speak, by 
the life-long presence there of one . of the most honoured 
of American men of lettei's — the poet from whom I just 
quoted two lines. Concord is, indeed, in itself decidedly 
verdant, and is an excellent specimen of a New England 
village of the riper sort. At the time of Hawthorne's first 
going there, it must have been an even better specimen 
than to-day — luove homogeneous, more indigenous, more 
absolutely democratic. Forty years ago the tide of foreign 
immigration had scarcely begun to break upon the rural 
strongholds of the New England race ; it had at most be- 
gun to splash them with the salt Hibernian spray. It is 
very possible, however, that at this period there was not an 
Irishman in Concord ; the place would have been a village 
community operating in excellent conditions. Such a vil-' 
lage community was not the least honourable item in the 
sum of New England civilisation. Its spreading elms and 
plain white houses, its generous summers and ponderous 
winters, its immediate background of promiscuous field and 
forest, would have been part of the composition. For the 
rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the 
town-schools and the self-governing spirit, the rigid moral- 
ity, the friendly and familiar manners, the perfect compe- 
tence of the little society to manage its affairs itself. In 
the delightful introduction to the Mosses, Hawthorne has 
given an account of his dwelling, of his simple occupations 
and recreations, and of some of the characteristics of the 
place. The Manse is a large, square wooden house, to the 
surface of which — even in the dry New England air, so 
unfriendly to mosses, and lichens, and weather-stains, and 
the other elements of a picturesque complexion — a hundred 

and fiftv years of exposure have imparted a kind of tone-, 

G 



92 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

standing just above the slow -flowing Concord river, and 
approached by a short avenue of over-arching trees. It 
had been the dwelling-place of generations of Presbyterian 
ministers, ancestors of the celebrated Emerson, who had 
himself spent his early manhood, and written some of his 
most beautiful essays there. " He used," as Hawthorne 
says, *' to watch the Assyrian dawn, and Paphiau sunset 
and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill." From 
its clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mus- 
tiness of theological association — a vague reverberation of 
old Calvin istic sermons, which served to deepen its extra- 
mundane and somnolent quality. The three years that 
Hawthorne passed here were, I should suppose, among the 
happiest of his life. The future was, indeed, not in any 
special manner assured ; but the present was sufficiently 
•genial. In the American Note-Books there is a charming 
passage (too long to quote) descriptive of the entertain- 
ment the new couple found in renovating and re-furnish- 
ing the old parsonage, which, at the time of their going 
into it, was given up to ghosts and cobwebs. Of the little 
drawing-room, which had been most completely reclaimed, 
he writes that " the shade of our departed host will never 
haunt it ; for its aspect has been as completely changed as 
the scenery of a theatre. Probably the ghost gave one 
peep into it, uttered a groan, and vanished forever." This 
departed host was a certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable 
scholar, who left behind him a reputation of learning and 
sanctity which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his 
family, long the most distinguished woman in the little 
Concord circle. Doctor Ripley's predecessor had been, I 
believe, the last of the line of the Emerson ministers — an 
old gentleman who, in the earlier years of his pastorate, 
sitood at the window of his study (the. same in which Haw- 



IV.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 93 

thorne handled a more irresponsible quill), watching, with 
his hands under his long coat-tails, the progress of the Con- 
cord fight. It is not by any means related, however, I 
should add, that he waited for the conclusion to make up 
his mind which was the righteous cause. 

Hawthorne had a little society (as much, we may infer, 
as he desired), and it was excellent in quality. But the 
pages in the Note -Books which relate to his life at the 
Manse, and the introduction to the Mosses, make more of 
his relations with vegetable nature, and of his customary 
contemplation of the incidents of wood-path and way-side, 
than of the human elements of the scene; though these 
also are gracefully touched upon. These pages treat large- 
ly of the pleasures of a kitchen-garden, of the beauty of 
summer - squashes, and of the mysteries of apple - raising. 
With the wholesome aroma of apples (as is, indeed, almost 
necessarily the case in any realistic record of New Eng- 
land rural life) they are especially pervaded; and with 
many other homely and domestic emanations; all of 
which derive a sweetness from the medium of our author's 
colloquial style. Hawthorne was silent with his lips ; but 
he talked with his pen. The tone of his writing is often 
that of charming talk — ingenious, fanciful, slow-flowing, 
with all the lightness of gossip, and none of its vulgarity. 
In the preface to the tales written at the Manse he talks 
of many things, and just touches upon some of the mem- 
bers of his circle — especially upon that odd genius, his 
fellow-villager, Henry Thoreau. I said, a little way back, 
that the New England Transcendental movement had suf- 
fered, in the estimation of the world at large, from not hav- 
ing (putting Emerson aside) produced any superior talents. 
But any reference to it would be ungenerous which should 
omit to pay a tribute, in passing, to the author of Walden. 



94 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

Whatever question there may be of his talent, there can 
be none, I think, of his geniils. It was a slim and crook- 
ed one, but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, 
unfinished, inartistic ; he was worse than provincial — he 
was parochial ; it is only at his best that he is readable. 
But at his best he has an extreme natural charm, and he 
must always be mentioned after those Americans — Emer- 
son, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley — who have 
written originally. He was Emerson's independent moral 
man made flesh — living for the ages, and not for Saturday 
and Sunday; for the Universe, and not for Concord. In 
fact, however, Thoreau lived for Concord very effectually ; 
and by his remarkable genius for the observation of the 
phenomena of woods and streams, of plants and trees, and 
beasts and fishes, and for flinging a kind of spiritual inter- 
est over these things, he did more than he perhaps intend- 
ed towards consolidating the fame of his accidental human 
sojourn. He was as shy and ungregarious as Hawthorne ; 
but he and the latter appear to have been sociably disposed 
towards each other, and there are some charming touches 
in the preface to the Mosses in regard to the hours they 
spent in boating together on the large, quiet Concord riv- 
er. Thoreau was a great voyager, in a canoe which he 
had constructed himself, and which he eventually made 
over to Hawthorne, and as expert in the use of the paddle 
as the Red men who had once haunted the same silent 
stream. The most frequent of Hawthorne's companions 
on these excursions appears, however, to have been a local 
celebrity — as well as Thoreau a high Transcendentalist — 
Mr. EUery CKanning, whom I may mention, since he is 
mentioned very explicit^y in the preface to the Mosses, 
and also because no account of the little Concord world 
w'ould be complete which should omit him. He was the 



IV.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 95 

son of the distinguished Unitarian moralist, and, I believe, 
the intimate friend of Thoreau, whom he resembled in 
having produced literary compositions more esteemed by 
the few than by the many. He and Hawthorne were both 
fishermen, and the two used to set themselves afloat in 
the summer afternoons. " Strange and happy times were 
those," exclaims the more distinguished of the two writ- 
ers, " when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced 
habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live 
like the Indians or any less conventional race, during one 
bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing our boat against 
the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside into 
the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile 
above its junction with the Qoncord, has never flowed on 
earth — nowhere, indeed, except to lave the interior regions 
of a poet's imagination. ... It comes flowing softly 
through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood 
which whispers it to be quiet; while the stream whispers 
back again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood 
were hushing one another to sleep. Yes ; the river sleeps 
along its course and dreams of the sky and the clustering 
folia2;e. . 4 ." While Hawthorne was lookina; at these beau- 
tiful things, or, for that matter, was writing them, he was 
well out of the way of a certain class of visitants whom he 
alludes to in one of the closing passages of this long In- 
troduction. " Never was a poor little country village in- 
fested with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, odd- 
ly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves 
to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were 
simply bores of a very intense character." " These hob- 
goblins of flesh and blood," he says, in a preceding par- 
agraph, " were attracted thither by the wide-spreading in- 
fluence of a great original thinker who had his earth- 



96 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

ly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. . . . 
People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought 
they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glit- 
tering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quali- 
ty and value;" and Hawthorne enumerates some of the 
categories of pilgrims to the shrine of the mystic coun- 
sellor, who as a general thing was probably far from 
abounding in their own sense (when this sense was per- 
verted), but gave them a due measure of plain practical 
advice. The whole passage is interesting, and it suggests 
that little Concord had not been ill-treated by the fates — 
with " a great original thinker " at one end of the village, 
an exquisite teller of tales at the other, and the rows of 
New England elms between. It contains, moreover, an 
admirable sentence about Hawthorne's pilgrim -haunted, 
neighbour, w^ith whom, "being happy," as he says, and 
feeling, therefore, " as if there were no question to be put," 
he was not in metaphysical communion. " It was good, 
"nevertheless, to meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes 
in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused 
about his presence, like the garment of a shining one ; 
and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encoun- 
tering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than 
he could impart !" One may without indiscretion risk the 
surmise that Hawthorne's perception of the "shining" el- 
ement in his distinguished friend was more intense than 
his friend's appreciation of whatever luminous property 
might reside within the somewhat dusky envelope of our 
hero's identity as a collector of " mosses." Emerson, as 
a sort of spiritual sun-worshipper, could have attached but 
a moderate value to Hawthorne's cat-like faculty of seeing 
in the dark. 

"As to the daily course of our life," the latter writes, 



IT.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 97 

in the spring of 1843, "I have written with .pretty com- 
mendable diligence, averaging from two to four hours a 
day ; and the result is seen in various magazines. I might 
have written more if it had seemed worth while, but I 
was content to earn only so much gold as might suffice 
for our immediate wants, having prospect of official station 
and emolument which would do away with the necessity 
of writing for bread. These prospects have not yet had 
their fulfilment ; and we are well content to wait, for an 
office would inevitably remove us from our present happy 
home — at least from an outward home ; for there is an 
inner one that will accompany us wherever we go. Mean- 
time, the magazine people do not pay their debts; so that 
we taste some of the inconveniences of poverty. It is an 
annoyance, not a trouble."* And he goes on to give some 
account of his usual habits. (The passage is from his 
Journal, and the account is given to himself, as it were, 
with that odd, unfamiliar explicitness which marks the 
tone of this record throughout.) " Every day I trudge 
through snow and slush to the village, look into the post- 
office, and spend an hour at the reading-room ; and then 
return home, generally without having spoken a word to 
any human being. ... In the way of exercise I saw and 
split wood, and physically I was never in a better condi- 
tion than now." He adds a mention of an absence he 
had lately made. " I went alone to Salem, where I re- 
sumed all ray bachelor habits for nearly a fortnight, lead- 
ing the same life in which ten years of my youth flitted 
away like a dream. But how much changed was I !' At 
last I had got hold of a reality which never could be 
taken from me. It was good thus to get apart from my 
happiness for the sake of contemplating it." 

These compositions, which were so unpunctually paid 
5* 



98 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

for, appeared in the Democratic Review, a periodical pub- 
lished at Washington, and having, as our author's biog- 
rapher says, " considerable pretensions to a national char- 
acter." It is to be regretted that the practice of keeping 
its creditors waiting should, on the part of the magazine 
in question, have been thought compatible with these pre- 
tensions. The foregoing lines are a description of a very- 
monotonous but a very contented life, and Mr. Lathrop 
justly remarks upon the dissonance of tone of the tales 
Hawthorne produced under these happy circumstances. 
It is, indeed, not a little of an anomaly. The episode of 
the Manse was one of the most agreeable he had known, 
and yet the best of the Mosses (though not the greater 
number of them) are singularly dismal compositions. 
They are redolent of M. Montegut's pessimism. " The 
reality of sin, the pervasiveness of evil," says Mr. Lathrop, 
" had been but slightly insisted upon in the earlier tales : 
in this series the idea bursts up like a long-buried fire, 
with earth-shaking strength, and the pits of hell seem 
yawning beneath us." This is veiy true (allowing for Mr. 
Lathrop's rather too emphatic way of putting it) ; but the 
anomaly is, I think, on the whole, only superficial. Our 
writer's imagination, as has been abundantly conceded, 
was a gloomy one ; the old Puritan sense of sin, of penal- 
ties to be paid, of the darkness and wickedness of life, 
had, as I have already suggested, passed into it. It had 
not passed into the parts of Hawthorne's nature corre- 
sponding to those occupied by the same horrible vision of 
things in his ancestors; but it had stilkbeen determined 
to claim this later comer as its own, and since his heart 
and his happiness were to escape, it insisted on setting its 
mark upon his genius — upon his most beautiful organ, his 
admirable fancy. It may be said that when his fancy was 



IV.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 99 

strongest and keenest, when it was most itself, then the 
dark Puritan tinge showed in it most richij ; and there 
cannot be a better proof that he was not the man of a 
sombre parti-pris whom M. Montegut describes, than the 
fact that these duskiest flowers of his invention sprang 
straight from the soil of his happiest days. This surely 
indicates that there was but little direct connection be- 
tween the products of his fancy and the state of his af- 
fections. When he was lightest at heart, he was most cre- 
ative ; and when he was most creative, the moral pictu- 
resqueness of the old secret of mankind in general and of 
the Puritans in particular, most appealed to him — the se- 
cret that we are really not by any means so good as a 
well - regulated society requires us to appear. It is not 
too much to say, even, that the very condition of produc- 
tion of some of these unamiable tales would be that they 
should be superficial, and, as it were, insincere. The mag- 
nificent little romance of Young Goodman Brown, for in- 
stance, evidently means nothing as regards Hawthorne's 
own state of mind, his conviction of human depravity and 
his consequent melancholy ; for the simple reason that, if 
it meant anything, it would mean too much. Mr. Lathrop 
speaks of it as a " terrible and lurid parable ;" but this, it 
seems to me, is just what it is not. It is not a parable, 
but a picture, which is a very different thing. What does 
M. Montegut make, one would ask, from the poin't of view 
of Hawthorne's pessimism, of the singularly objective and 
unpreoccupied tone of the Introduction to the Old Manse, 
in which the author speaks from himself, and in which 
the cry of metaphysical despair is not even faintly 
sounded ? 

We have seen that when he went into the village he of- 
ten came home without having spoken a word to a human 



100 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

being. There is a touching entry made a little later, bear- 
ing upon his mild taciturnity. "A cloudy veil stretches 
across the abyss of my nature. I have, however, no love 
of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God 
sees through my heart, and if any angel has power to pen- 
etrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is 
there. Yes, and so may any mortal who is capable of full 
sympathy, and therefore worthy to come into my depths. 
But he must find his own way there ; I can neither guide 
nor enlighten him." It must be acknowledged, however, 
that if he was not able to open the gate of conversation, it 
was sometimes because he was disposed to slide the bolt 
himself. " I had a purpose," he writes, shortly before the 
entry last quoted, "if circumstances would permit, of pass- 
ing the whole term of my wife's absence without speaking 
a word to any human being." He beguiled these incom- 
municative periods by studying German, in Tieck and 
Burger, without apparently making much progress ; also 
in reading French, in Voltaire and Rabelais. " Just now," 
he writes, one October noon, " I heard a sharp tapping at 
the window of my study, and, looking up from my book 
(a volume of Rabelais), behold, the. head of a little bird, 
who seemed to demand admittance." It was a quiet life, 
of course, in which these diminutive incidents seemed note- 
worthy ; and what is noteworthy here to the observer of 
Hawthorne's contemplative simplicity, is the fact that, 
though he finds a good deal to say about the little bird 
(he devotes several lines more to it), he makes no remark 
upon Rabelais. He had other visitors than little birds, 
however, and their demands were also not Rabelaisian. 
Thoreau comes to see him, and, they talk " upon the spir- 
itual advantages of change of place, and upon the Dial^ 
and upon Mr. Alcott, and other kindred or concatenated 



nr.] BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. 101 

subjects." Mr. Alcott was an arch-transcendentalist, living 
in Concord, and the Dial was a periodical to which the 
illuminated spirits of Boston and its neighbourhood used 
to contribute. Another visitor comes and talks "of Mar- 
garet Fuller, who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a high- 
er state since their last meeting." There is probably a 
oTeat deal of Concord five-and-thirty years ago in that lit- 
tle sentence ! * 



CHAPTER V. 

THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 

The prospect of official station and emolument which 
Hawthorne mentions in one of .those paragraphs from 
his Journals which I have just quoted, as having offered 
itself and then passed away, was at last, in the event. Con- 
firmed by his receiving from the administration of Presi- 
dent Polk the gift of a place in the Custom-house of his 
native town. The office was a modest one, and " official 
station " may perhaps appear a magniloquent formula for 
the functions sketched in the admirable Introduction to 
The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne's duties were those of 
Surveyor of the port of Salem, and they had a salary at- 
tached, which was the important part ; as his biographer 
tells us that he had received almost nothing for the con- 
tributions to the Democratic Review. He bade farewell 
to his ex-parsonage, and went back to Salem in 1846, and 
the immediate effect of his ameliorated fortune was to 
make him stop writing. None of his Journals of the 
period, from his going to Salem to 1850, have been pubr 
lished ; from which I infer that he even ceased to journal- 
ise. The Scarlet Letter was not written till 1849. In 
the delightful prologue to that work, entitled The Custom- 
house, he embodies some of the impressions gathered dur- 



CHAP, v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 103 

ing these years of comparative leisure (I say of leisure, be- 
cause he does not intimate in this sketch of his occupa- 
tions that his duties were onerous). He intimates, how- 
ever, that they were not interesting, and that it was a very 
good thing for him, mentally and morally, when his term 
of service expired — or rather when he was removed from 
office by the operation of that wonderful " rotatory " sys- 
tem which his countrymen had invented for the adminis- 
tration of their affairs. This sketch of the Custom-house 
is, as simple writing, one of the most perfect of Haw- 
thorne's compositions, and one of the most gracefully and 
humorously autobiographic. It would be interesting to 
examine it in detail, but I prefer to use my space for mak- 
ing some remarks upou the work which was the ultimate 
result of this period of Hawthorne's residence in his native 
town ; and I shall, for convenience' sake, say directly after- 
wards what T have to say about the two companions of 
The Scarlet Letter — The House of the Seven Gables and 
The Blithedale Romance. I quoted some passages from 
the prologue to the first of these novels in the early pages 
of this essay. There is another passage, however, which 
bears particularly upon this phase of Hawthorne's career, 
and which is so happily expressed as to make it a pleas- 
ure to transcribe it — the passage in which he says that 
" for myself, during the whole of my Custom-house expe- 
rience, moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of the tiro- 
light, were just alike in my regard, and neither of them 
was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of a tallow- 
candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift con- 
nected with them — of no great richness or value, but the 
best I had — was gone from me." He goes on to say that 
he believes that he might have done something if he could 
have made up his mind to convert the very substance of 



104 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

the commonplace that surrounded him into matter of lit- 
erature. 

" I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing 
out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the inspect- 
ors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention ; 
since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter 
and admiration by his marvellous gift as a story-teller. . . . 
Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was 
a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so in- 
trusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into an- 
other age ; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world 
out of airy matter. . , . The wiser effort would have been, 
to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque sub- 
stance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency . . . 
to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay 
hidden in the petty and w^earisome incidents and ordinary 
characters with which I was now conversant. The fault 
was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me 
was dull and commonplace, only because I had not fath- 
omed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever 
wnite was there. . . . These perceptions came too late. . . . 
I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and es- 
says, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Cus- 
toms. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but 
agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect 
is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, 
like ether out of phial ; so that at every glance you find a 
smaller and less volatile residuum." 

As, however, it was with what was left of his intellect af- 
ter three years' evaporation, that Hawthorne wrote The 
Scarlet Letter, there is little reason to complain of the 
injury he suffered in his Surveyorship. 

His publisher, Mr. Fields, in a volume entitled Yester- 
days with Authors, has related the circumstances in which 



T.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 105 

Hawthorne's masterpiece came into the world. " In the 
winter of 1849, after he had been ejected from the Cus- 
tom-house, I went down to Salem to see him and inquire 
after his health, for we heard he had been suffering from 
illness. He was then living in a modest wooden house. . . . 
I found him alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of 
the dwelling, and as the day was cold he was hovering near 
a stove.- We fell into talk about his future prospects, and 
he was, as I feared I should find him, in a very despond- 
ing mood." His visitor urged him to bethink himself of 
publishing something, and Hawthorne replied by calling 
his attention to the small popularity his published pro- 
ductions had yet acquired, and declaring he had done 
nothing, and had no spirit for doing anything. The nar- 
rator of the incident urged upon him the necessity of a 
more hopeful view of his situation, and proceeded to take 
leave. He had not reached the street, however, when 
Hawthorne hurried to overtake him, and, placing a roll 
of MS. in his hand, bade him take it to Boston, read it, 
and pronounce upon it. " It is either very good or very 
bad," said the author ; " I don't know which." " On my 
way back to Boston," says Mr. Fields, " I read the germ of 
The Scarlet Letter; before I slept that night I wrote him 
a note all aglow with admiration of the marvellous story 
he had put into my hands, and told him that I would 
come again to Salem the next day and arrange for its pub- 
lication. I went on in such an amazing state of excite- 
ment, when we met again in the little house, that he 
would not believe I was really in earnest. He seemed 
to think I was beside myself, and laughed sadly at my 
enthusiasm." Hawthorne, however, went on with the 
book and finished it, but it appeared only a year later. 
His biographer quotes a passage from a letter which he 



106 HAWTHORNE. |;chap. 

wrote in February, 1850, to his friend Horatio Bridge. 
" I finished my book only yesterday ; one end being in 
the press at Boston, while the other was m my head here 
at Salem ; so that, as you see, my story is at least fourteen 
miles long. . . . My book, the publisher tells me, will not 
be out before April. He speaks of it in tremendous terms 
of approbation ; so does Mrs. Hawthorne, to whom I read 
the conclusion last night. It broke her heart, and sent her 
to bed with a grievous headache — which I look upon as a 
triumphant success. Judging from the effect upon her and 
the publisher, I may calculate on what bowlers call a ten- 
strike. But I don't make any such calculation." And 
Mr. Lathrop calls attention, in regard to this passage, to 
an allusion in the English Note -Books (September 14, 
1855). "Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at 
his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare 
it to my own emotions when I read the last scene of The 
Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it — tried to 
read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved as if I 
were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after 
a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having 
gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it, 
for many months." 

The work has the tone of the circumstances in which 
it was produced. If Hawthorne was in a sombre mood, 
and if his future was painfully vague. The Scarlet Letter 
contains little enough of gaiety or of hopefulness. It is 
densely dark, with a single spot of vivid colour in it ; and 
it will probably long remain the most consistently gloomy 
of English novels of the first order. But I just now called 
it the author's masterpiece, and I imagine it will continue 
to be, for other generations than ours, his most substantial 
title to fame. The subject had probably lain a long time 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 107 

in his mind, as bis subjects were apt to do ; so that he ap- 
pears completely to possess it, to know it and feel it. Iti 
is simpler and more complete than his other novels ; it \^ 
achieves more perfectly what it attempts, and it has about 
it that charm, very hard to express, which we find in an 
artist's Avork the first time he has touched his highest 
mark — a sort 'of straightness and naturalness of execution, 
an unconsciousness of his public, and freshness of interest . 
in his theme. It was a great success, and he immediate- 
ly found himself famous. The writer of these lines, who 
was a child at the time, remembers dimly the sensation 
the book produced, and the little shudder with which 
people alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror were mixed 
with its attractions. He was too young to read it him- 
self ; but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the 
book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. He 
had a vague belief, indeed, that the " letter " in question 
was one of the documents that come by the post, and it 
was a source of perpetual wonderment to him that it 
should be of such an unaccustomed hue. Of course it 
was diflScult to explain to a child the significance of poor 
Hester Prynne's blood- coloured A. But the mystery was 
at last partly dispelled by his being taken to see a collec- 
tion of pictures (the annual exhibition of the National 
Academy), where he encountered a representation of a 
pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and a 
white coif, holding between her knees an elfish -looking 
little girl, fantastically dressed, and crowned with flowers. 
Embroidered on the woman's breast was a great crimson 
A, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced stran2;ely 
out of the picture, were maliciousl}^ playing. I was told 
that this w^as Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and that when 

I grew older I might read their interesting history. But 
H 



108 HAWTllOENP]. [chap. 

the picture remained vividly imprinted on my mind ; I 
had been vaguely frightened and made uneasy by it ; and 
when, years afterwards,! first read the novel, I seemed to 
myself to have read it before, and to be familiar with its 
two strange heroines. I mention this incident simply as 
an indication of the degree to which the success of The 
Scarlet Letter had made the book what is called an actu- 
ality. Hawthorne himself was very modest about it ; he 
wrote to his publisher, when there was a question of his 
undertaking another novel, that what had given the his- 
tory of Hester Prynne its " vogue " was simply the intro- 
ductory chapter. In fact, the publication of The Scarlet 
Letter was in the United States a literary event of the first 
importance. The book was the finest piece of imaginative 
writing yet put forth in the country. There was a con- 
sciousness of this in the welcome that was given it — a sat- 
isfaction in the idea of America having produced a novel 
that belonged to literature, and to the forefront of it. 
Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in 
quality as anything that had been received, and the best 
of it was that the thing was absolutely American ; it be- 
longed to the soil, to the air ; it came out of the very 
heart of New England. 

It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary ; it has in the 
highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as the 
mark of Hawthorne's best things — an indefinable purity 
and lightness of conception, a quality which in a work of 
art affects one in the same way as the absence of grossness 
does in a human being. His fancy, as I just now said, 
had evidently brooded over the subject for a long time ; 
the situation to be I'epresented had disclosed itself to him 
in all its phases. When I say in all its phases, the sen- 
tence demands modification ; for it is to be remembered 



y] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 109 

that if Hawthorne laid his hand upon the well-worn theme, 
upon the familiar combination of the wife, the lover, and 
the husband, it was, after all, but to one period of the his- 
tory of these three persons that he attached himself. ^ The 
situation is the situation after the woman's fault has been 
committed, and the current of expiation and repentance 
has set in. In spite of the relation between Hester Prynne 
and Arthur Dimmesdale, no story of love was surely ever 
less of a " love-story .''* To Hawthorne's imagination the 
fact that these two persons had loved each other too well 
was of an interest comparatively vulgar; what appealed tb 
him was the idea of theiiwnoral_situ.ation in the long_years 

that were to^foljiig The story, indeed, is in a secondary | 

degree that of Hester Prynne ; she becomes, really, after 
the first scene, an accessory figure ; it is not upon her the 
denoument depends. It is upon her guilty lover that the 
author projects most frequently the cold, thin rays of his 
fitfully-moving lantern, which makes here and there a lit- 
tle luminous circle, on the edge of which hovers the livid 
and sinister figure of the injured and retributive husband. 
The story goes on, for tlie most part, between the lover and 
the husband — the tormented young Puritan minister, who 
carries the secret ot his own lapse from pastoral purity 
locked up beneath an exterior that commends itself .to 
the reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner 
of his guilt standing in the full glare of exposure and 
humbling herself to the misery of atonement — between 
this more wa-etched and pitiable culprit, to whom dishon- 
our would coHjle as a comfort and the pillory as a relief, 
and the older^ keener, wiser man, who, to obtain satisfac- 
tion for the wrong he has suffered, devises the infernally 
ingenious plan of conjoining himself with his wronger, 
living with him, living upon him ; and while he pretends to 



110 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his 
pain, revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things, 
and stimulates them by malignant arts. The attitude of 
Roger Chillingworth, and the means he takes to compen- 
sate himself — these are the highly original elements in the 
situation that Hawthorne so ingeniousl}^ trea|rS^ None of 
his works are so impregnated with that after-sense of the 
old Puritan consciousness of life to which allusion has so 
often been made. If, as M. Montegut says, the qualities 
of his ancestors filtered down through generations into his 
composition. The Scarlet Letter was, as it were, the vessel 
that gathered up the last of the precious drops. And I 
say this not because the story happens to be of so-called 
historical cast, to be told of the early days of Massachu- 
setts, and of people in steeple-crowned hats and sad-colour- 
ed garments. The historical colouring is rather weak than 
otherwise ; there is little elaboration of detail, of the mod- 
ern realism of research ; and the author has made no great 
point of causing his figures to speak the English of their 
period. Nevertheless, the book is full of the moral pres- 
ence of the race that invented Hester's penance — diluted 
and complicated with other things, but still perfectly rec- 
ognisable. \Puritanism, in a word, is there, not only objec- 
tively, as Hawthorne tried to place it there, but subjective- 
ly as well. Not, I mean, in his judgment of his charac- 
ters in any harshness of prejudice, or in the obtrusion of a 
moral lesson ; but in the very quality of his own vision, in 
the tone of the picture, in a certain coldness and exclusive- 
ness of treatment. 

The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of re- 
ality and an abuse of the fanciful element — of a certain 
superficial symbolism. The people strike me not as char- 
acters, but as representatives, very picturesquely arranged. 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. Ill 

of a single state of mind ; and the interest of the story 
lies, not in them, but in the situation, which is insistently 
kept before us, with little progression, though with a great 
deal, as I have said, of a certain stable variation ; and to 
which they, out of their reality, contribute little that helps 
it to live and move. I was made to feel this want of real- 
ity, this over-ingenuity, of The Scarlet Letter, by chancing 
not long since upon a novel which was read fifty years 
ago much more than to-day, but which is still worth read- 
ing — the story of Adam Blair, by John Gibson Lockhart. 
This interesting and powerful little tale has a great deal of 
analogy with Hawthorne's novel — quite enough, at least, 
to suggest a comparison between them ; and the compari- 
son is a very interesting one to make, for it speedily leads 
us to larger considerations than simple resemblances and 
divergences of plot. 

Adam Blair, like Arthur Diramesdale, is a Calvinistic 
minister who becomes the lover of a married woman, is 
overwhelmed with remorse at his misdeed, and makes a 
public confession of it ; then expiates it by resigning his 
pastoral office and becoming a humble tiller of the soil, as 
his father had been. The two stories are of about the 
same length, and each is the masterpiece (putting aside, 
of course, as far as Lockhart is concerned, the Life of 
Scott) of the author. They deal alike with the manners 
of a rigidly theological society, and even in certain details 
they correspond. In each of them, between the guilty 
pair, there is a charming little girl ; though I hasten to 
say that Sarah Blair (who is not the daughter of the hero- 
ine, but the legitimate offspring of the hero, a widower) 
is far from being as brilliant and graceful an apparition 
as the admirable little Pearl of The Scarlet Letter. The 
main difference between the two tales is the fact that in 



112 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

the American story the husband plays an ail-important 
part, and in the Scottish plays almost none at all. Adam 
Blair is the history of the passion, and The Scarlet Letter 
the history of its sequel ; but nevertheless, if one has read 
the two books at a short interval, it is impossible to avoid 
confronting them. I confess that a large portion of the 
interest of Adam Blair, to my mind, when once I had 
perceived that it would repeat in a great measure the sit- 
uation of The Scarlet Letter, lay in noting its difference of 
tone. It threw into relief the passionless quality of Haw- 
thorne's novel, its element of cold and ingenious fantasy, 
its elaborate imaginative delicacy. These things do not 
precisely constitute a weakness in The Scarlet Letter ; in- 
deed, in a certain way they constitute a great strength ; 
but the absence of a certain something warm and straight- 
forward, a trifle more grossly human and vulgarly natural, 
which one finds in Adam Blair, will always make Haw- 
thorne's tale less touching to a large number of even very 
intelligent readers, than a love-story told with the robust, 
synthetic pathos which served Lockhart so well. His 
novel is not of the first rank (I should call it an excellent 
second-rate one), but it borrows a charm from the fact 
that his vio'orous, but not strono-ly imaoinative, mind was 
impregnated with the reality of his subject. He did not 
always succeed in rendering this reality ; the expression 
is sometimes awkward and poor. But the reader feels 
that his vision was clear, and his feeling about the matter 
very strong and rich, Hawthorne's imagination, on the 
other hand, plays with his theme so incessantly, leads it 
such a dance through the moon-lighted air of his intellect, 
that the thing cools off, as it were, hardens and stiffens, 
and, producing effects much more exquisite, leaves the 
reader with a sense of having handled a splendid piece of 



T.J THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 113 

silversmith's work. Loekhart, by means much more vul- 
gar, produces at moments a greater illusion, and satisfies 
our inevitable desire for something, in the people in whom 
it is sought to interest us, that shall be of the same pitch 
and the same continuity with ourselves. Above all, it is 
interesting to see how the same subject appears to two 
men of a thoroughly different cast of mind and of a differ- 
ent race. Loekhart was struck with the warmth of the 
subject that offered itself to him, and Hawthorne with its 
coldness; the one with its glow, its sentimental interest — 
the other with its shadow, its moral interest. Lockhart's 
story is as decent, as severely draped, as The Scarlet Let- 
ter ; but the author has a more vivid sense than appears 
to have imposed itself upon Hawthorne, of some of the in- 
cidents of the situation he describes ; his tempted man and 
tempting woman are more actual and personal ; his heroine 
in especial, though not in the least a delicate or a subtle 
conception, has a sort of credible, visible, palpable proper- 
ty, a vulgar roundness and relief, which are lacking to the 
dim and chastened image of Hester Prynne. But I am 
going too far; I am comparing simplicity with subtlety, 
the usual with the refined. Each man wrote as his turn of 
mind impelled him, but each expressed something more 
than himself. Loekhart was a dense, substantial Briton, 
with a taste for the concrete, and Hawthorne was a thin 
New Englander, with a miasmatic conscience. 

In The Scarlet Letter there is a great deal of symbolism ; 
there is, I think, too much. It is overdone at times, and 
becomes mechanical ; it ceases to be impressive, and grazes 
triviality. The idea of the mystic A which the young 
minister finds imprinted upon his breast and eating into 
his flesh, in sympathy with the embroidered badge that 
Hester is condemned to wear, appears to me to be a case 
6 



114 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

in point. This suggestion should, I think, have been just 
made and dropped; to insist upon it and return to it, is to 
exaggerate the weak side of the subject. Hawthorne re- 
turns to it constantly, plays with it, and seems charmed by 
it; until at last the reader feels tempted to declare that his 
enjoyment of it is puerile. In the admirable scene, sd su- 
perbly conceived and beautifully executed, in which Mr. 
Dimmesdale, in the stillness of the night, in the middle of 
the sleeping town, feels impelled to go and stand upon the 
scaffold where his mistress had formerly enacted her dread- 
ful penance, and then, seeing Hester pass along the street, 
from watching at a sick-bed, with little Pearl at her side, 
calls them both to come and stand there beside him — in 
this masterly episode the effect is almost spoiled by the 
introduction of one of these superficial conceits. What 
leads up to it is very fine — so fine that I cannot do better 
than quote it as a specimen of one of the striking pages of 
the book. 

" But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light 
gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was 
doubtless caused by one of those meteors which the night- 
watcher may so often observe burning out to waste in the 
vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its 
radiance that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium 
of cloud betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault bright- 
ened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the fa- 
miliar scene of the street with the distinctness of mid-day, 
but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to famil- 
iar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, 
with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the door- 
steps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about 
them; the garden-plots, black with freshly -turned earth; 
the wheel-track, little w^orn, and, even in the market-place, 
margined with green on either side; — all were visible, but 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 115 

with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another 
moral interpretation to the things of this world than they 
had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with 
his hand over his heart ; and Hester Prynne, with the em- 
broidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, 
herself a symbol, and the connecting link between these two. 
They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splen- 
dour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and 
the daybreak that shall unite all that belong to one another.'' 

That is imaginative, impressive, poetic ; but when, al- 
most immediately afterwards, the author goes on to say 
that "the minister looking upward to the zenith, beheld 
there the appearance of an immense letter — the letter A — 
marked out in lines of dull red light," we feel that he 
goes too far, and is in danger of crossing the line that sep- 
arates the sublime from its intimate neighbour. We are 
tempted to say that this is not moral tragedy, but physical 
comedy. In the same way, too much is made of the in- 
timation that Hester's badge had a scorching property, 
and that if one touched it one would immediately with- 
draw one's hand. Hawthorne is perpetually looking for 
images which shall place themselves in picturesque cor- 
respondence with the spiritual facts with which he is con- 
cerned, and of course the search is of the very essence of 
poetry. But in such a process discretion is everything, 
and when the image becomes importunate it is in danger 
of seeming to stand for nothing more serious than itself. 
When Hester meets the minister by appointment in the 
forest, and sits talking with him while little Pearl wanders 
away and plays by the edge of the brook, the child is rep- 
resented as at last making her way over to the other side 
of the woodland stream, and disporting herself there in a 
manner which makes her mother feel herself, " in some in- 



116 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

distinct and tantalising manner, estranged from Pearl ; as 
if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had 
strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother 
dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to 
it." And Hawthorne devotes a chapter to this idea of 
the child's having, by putting the brook between Hester 
and herself, established a kind of spiritual gulf, on the 
verge of which her little fantastic person innocently mocks 
at her mother's sense of- bereavement. This conception 
belongs, one would say, quite to the lighter order of a 
story-teller's devices, and the reader hardly goes with Haw- 
thorne in the large development he gives to it. He hard- 
ly goes with him either, I think, in his extreme predilec- 
tion for a small number of vague ideas which are repre- 
sented by such terms as "sphere" and "sympathies." 
Hawthorne makes too liberal a use of these two substan- 
tives ; it is the solitary defect of his style ; and it counts 
as a defect partly because the words in question are a sort 
of specialty with certain writers immeasurably inferior to 
himself. 

I had not meant, however, to expatiate upon his defects, 
which are of the slenderest and most venial kind. The 
Scarlet Letter has the beauty and harmony of all original 
and complete conceptions, and its weaker spots, whatever 
they are, are not of its essence ; they are mere light flaws 
and inequalities of surface. One can often return to it; it 
supports familiarity, and has the inexhaustible charm and 
mystery of great works of art. It is admirably written. 
Hawthorne afterwards polished his style to a still higher 
degree ; but in his later productions — it is almost always 
the case in a writer's later productions — there is a touch 
of mannerism. In The Scarlet Letter there is a high de- 
gree of polish, and at the same time a charming freshness; 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 117 

his phrase is less conscious of itself. His biographer very x 
justly calls attention to the fact that his style was excel- A 
lent from the beginning ; that he appeared to have passed 
through no phase of learning how to write, but was in pos- 
session of his means, from the first, of his handling a pen. 
His early tales, perhaps, were not of a character to subject 
his faculty of expression to a very severe test ; but a man 
who had not Hawthorne's natural sense of language would 
certainly have contrived to write them less well. This nat- 
ural sense of language — this turn for saying things lightly 
and yet touchingly, picturesquely yet simply', and for in- 
fusing a gently colloquial tone into matter of the most 
unfamiliar import — he had evidently cultivated with great 
assiduity. I have spoken of the anomalous character of 
his Note-Books — of his going to such pains often to make 
a record of incidents which either were not worth remem- 
bering, or could be easily remembered without its aid. But 
it helps us to understand the Note-Books if we regard them 
as a literary exercise. They were compositions, as school- 
boys say, in which the subject was only the pretext, and 
the main point was to write a certain amount of excellent 
English. Hawthorne must at least have written a great 
many of these things for practice, and he must often have 
said to himself that it was better practice to write about 
trifles, because it was a greater tax upon one's skill to make 
them interesting. And his theory was just, for he has al- 
most always made his trifles interesting. In his novels his 
art of savins; thino-s well is verv positivelv tested ; for here 
he treats of those matters among which it is very easy for 
a blundering writer to go wrong — the subtleties and mys- 
teries of life, the moral and spiritual maze. In such a pas- 
sage as one I have marked for quotation from The Scarlet 
Letter, there is the stamp of the genius of style : — 



118 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

" Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt 
a dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence 
she knew not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own 
sphere and utterly beyond her reach. One glance of recogni- 
tion she had imagined must needs pass between them. She 
thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of solitude, and 
love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting 
hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk 
with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had 
they known each other then ! And was this the man ? She 
hardly knew him now ! He, moving proudly past, enveloped 
as it were in the rich music, with the procession of majestic 
and venerable fathers ; he, so unattainable in his worldly po- 
sition, and still more so in that far vista in his unsympathis- 
ing thoughts, through which she now beheld him ! Her spirit 
sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that 
vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond 
betwixt the clergyman and herself. And thus much of wom- 
an there was in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him — 
least of all now,w"hen the heavy footstep of their approaching 
fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer ! — for being able 
to withdraw himself so completely from their mutual world ; 
while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, 
and found him not !" 

The House of the Seven Gables Avas written at Lenox, 
among the mountains of Massachusetts, a village nestling, 
rather loosely, in one of the loveliest corners of New Eng- 
land, to which Hawthorne had betaken himself after the 
success of The Scarlet Letter became conspicuous, in the 
summer of 1850, and where he occupied for two years an 
uncomfortable little red house, which is now pointed out 
to the inquiring stranger. The inquiring stranger is now 
a frequent figure at Lenox, for the place has suffered the 
process of lionisation. It has become a prosperous water- 
ing-place, or at least (as there are no waters), as they say in 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 119 

America, a summer-resort. It is a brilliant and generous 
landscape, and thirty years ago a man of fancy, desiring to 
apply himself, might have found both inspiration and tran- 
quillity there. Hawthorne found so much of both that 
he wrote more during his two years of residence at Lenox 
than at any period of his career. He began with The House 
of the Seven Gahles, which was finished in the early part 
of 1851. This is the longest of his three American nov- 
els ; it is the most elaborate, and in the judgment of some 
persons it is the finest. It is a rich, delightful, imagina- 
tive work, larger and more various than its companions, 
and full of all sorts of deep intentions, of interwoven 
threads of suggestion. But it is not so rounded and 
complete as The Scarlet Letter; it has always seemed to 
me more like a prologue to a great novel than a great 
novel itself. I think this is partly owing to the fact that 
the subject, the donnee, as the French say, of the story, 
does not quite fill it out, and that we get at the same time 
an impression of certain complicated purposes on the au- 
thor's part, which seem to reach beyond it. I call it larger 
and more various than its companions, and it has, indeed, a 
greater richness of tone and density of detail. The colour, 
so to speak, of The House of the Seven Gables is admira- 
ble. But the story has a sort of expansive quality which 
never wholly fructifies, and as I lately laid it down, after 
reading it for the third time, I had a sense of having in- 
terested myself in a magnificent fragment. Yet the book 
has a great fascination ; and of all of those of its author's 
productions which I have read over while writing this 
sketch, it is perhaps the one that has gained most by re- 
persual. If it be true of the others that the pure, natural 
quality of the imaginative strain is their great merit, this 
is at, least as true of The House of the Seven Gables, the 



120 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

charm of which is in a peculiar degree of the kind that 
we fail to reduce to its grounds — like that of the sweet- 
ness of a piece of music, or the softness of fine September 
weather. It is vague, indefinable, ineffable ; but it is tlie 
sort of thing we must always point to in justification of 
the high claim that we make for Hawthorne. In this 
case, of course, its vagueness is a drawback, for it is diffi- 
cult to point to ethereal beauties ; and if the reader whom 
we have wished to inoculate with our admiration inform 
us, after looking awhile, that he perceives nothing in par- 
ticular, we can only reply that, in effect, the object is a 
delicate one. 

The House of the Seven Gables comes nearer being a 
picture of contemporary American life than either of its 
companions; but on this ground it would be a mistake to 
make a large claim for it. It cannot be too often repeat- 
ed that Hawthorne was not a realist. He had a high 
sense of reality — his Note-Books superabundantly testify 
to it; and fond as he was of jotting down the items that 
make it up, he never attempted to render exactly or close- 
ly the actual facts of the society that surrounded him. I 
have said — I began by saying — that his pages were full of 
its spirit, and of a certain reflected light that springs from 
it ; but I was careful to add that the reader must look for 
his local and national qualities between the lines of his 
writing and in the indirect testimony of his tone, his ac- 
cent, his temper, of his very omissions and suppressions. 
The House of the Seven Gahles has, however, more literal 
actuality than the others, and if it were not too fanciful an 
account of it, I should say that it renders, to an initiated 
reader, the impression of a summer afternoon in an elm- 
shadowed New England town. It leaves upon the mind 
a vague correspondence to some such reminiscence, and in 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 121 

stirring up the association it renders it delightful. The 
comparison is to the honour of the New England town, 
which gains in it more than it bestows. The shadows of 
the elms, in The House of the Seven Gables, are exception- 
ally dense and cool ; the summer afternoon is peculiarly 
still and beautiful ; the atmosphere has a delicious warmth, 
and the long daylight seems to pause and rest. But the 
mild provincial quality is there, the mixture of shabbiness 
and freshness, the paucity of ingredients. The end of an 
old race — this is the situation that Hawthorne has depict- 
ed, and he has been admirably inspired in the choice of the 
figures in whom he seeks to interest us. They are all fig- 
ures rather than characters — they are all pictures rather 
than persons. But if their reality is light and vague, it is 
sufficient, and it is in harmony with the low relief and 
dimness of outline of the objects that surrounded them. 
They are all types, to the author's mind, of something gen- 
eral, of something that is bound up with the history, at 
large, of families and individuals, and each of them is the 
centre of a cluster of those ingenious and meditative mus- 
ings, rather melancholy, as a general thing, than joyous, 
which melt into the current and texture of the story and 
give it a kind of moral richness. A grotesque old spin- 
ster, simple, childish, penniless, very humble at heart, but 
rigidly conscious of her pedigree ; an amiable bachelor, 
of an epicurean temperament and an enfeebled intellect, 
who has passed twenty years of his life in penal confine- 
ment for a crime of which he was unjustly pronounced 
guilty ; a sweet-natured and bright-faced young girl from 
the country, a poor relation of these two ancient de- 
crepitudes, with whose moral mustiness her modern fresh- 
ness and soundness are contrasted ; a young man still 
more modern, holding the latest opinions, who has sought 
6* 



122 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

Ms fortune up and down the world, and, though he has 
not found it, takes a genial and enthusiastic view of the 
future ; these, with two or three remarkable accessory fig- 
ures, are the persons concerned in the little drama. The 
drama is a small one, but as Hawthorne does not put it 
before us for its own superficial sake, for the dry facts 
of the case, but for something in it which he holds to be 
symbolic and of large application, something that points a 
moral and that it behoves us to remember, the scenes in 
the rusty wooden house whose gables give its name to the 
story, have something of the dignity both of history and 
of tragedy. Miss Hephzibah Pyncheon, dragging out a 
disappomted life in her paternal dwelling, finds herself 
obliged in her old age to open a little shop for the sale 
of penny toys and gingerbread. This is the central inci- 
dent of the tale, and, as Hawthorne relates it, it is ah inci- 
dent of the most impressive magnitude and most touching 
interest. Her dishonoured and vague -minded brother is 
released from prison at the same moment, and returns to 
the ancestral roof to deepen her perplexities. But, on the 
other hand, to alleviate them, and to introduce a breath of 
the air of the outer world into this lono; unventilated in- 
terior, the little country cousin also arrives, and proves the 
good angel of the feebly distracted household. All this 
episode is exquisite — admirably conceived and executed, 
with a kind of humorous tenderness, an equal sense of 
everything in it that is picturesque, touching, ridiculous, 
worthy of the highest praise. Hephzibah Pyncheon, with 
her near-sighted scowl, her rusty joints, her antique turban, 
her map of a great territory to the eastward which ought 
to have belonged to her family, her vain terrors, and scru- 
ples, and resentments, the inaptitude and repugnance of an 
ancient gentlewoman to the vulgar little commerce which 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 123 

a cruel fate has compelled lier to engage in — Hephzibah 
Pyncheon is a masterly picture. I repeat that she is a 
picture, as her companions are pictures ; she is a charming 
piece of descriptive writing, rather than a dramatic exhi- 
bition. But she is described, like her companions, too, so 
subtly and lovingly that we enter into her virginal old 
heart and stand with her behind her abominable little 
counter. Clifford Pyncheon is a still more remarkable 
conception, though he is, perhaps, not so vividly depicted. 
It was a figure needing a much more subtle touch, how- 
ever, and it was of the essence of his character to be vague 
and un emphasised. Nothing can be more charming than 
the manner in which the soft, bright, active presence of 
Phoebe Pyncheon is indicated, or than the account of her 
relations with the poor, dimly sentient kinsman for whom 
her light-handed sisterly offices, in the evening of a melan 
choly life, are a revelation of lost possibilities of happiness. 
" In her aspect," Hawthorne says of the young girl, " there 
was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that you could play 
with, and yet reverence it as much as ever. She was like 
a prayer offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's moth- 
er-tongue. Fresh w^as Phoebe, moreover, and airy, and 
sweet in her apparel ; as if nothing that she wore — nei- 
ther her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little 
kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings — had ever 
been put on before ; or, if worn, were all the fresher for it, 
and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the rose- 
buds." Of the influence of her maidenly salubrity upon 
poor Clifford, Hawthorne gives the prettiest description, 
and then, breaking off suddenly, renounces the attempt m 
language which, while pleading its inadequacy, conveys an 
exquisite satisfaction to the reader. I quote the passage 
for the sake of its extreme felicity, and of the charming 
image with which it concludes. 
I 



!24 HAWTHORNE. • [chap. 

" But we strive in vain to put the idea into vp^ords. No 
adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos with 
which it impresses us is attainable. This being, made only 
for happiness, and heretofore so miserably failing to be happy 
— his tendencies so hideously thwarted that, some unknown 
time ago, the delicate springs of his character, never moral- 
ly or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now 
imbecile — this poor forlorn voyager from the Islands of the 
Blest, in a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung 
by the last mountain - wave of his shipwreck into a quiet 
harbour. There, as he lay more than half lifeless on the 
strand, the fragrance of an earthly rose-bud had come to his 
nostrils, and, as odours will, had summoned up reminiscences 
or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which 
he should have had his home. With his native susceptibil- 
ity of happy influences, he inhales the slight ethereal rapture 
into his soul, and expires !" 

I have not mentioned the personage in The House of 
the Seven Gables upon whom Hawthorne evidently bestow- 
ed most pains, and whose portrait is the most elaborate in 
the book ; partly because he is, in spite of the space he 
occupies, an accessory figure, and partly because, even more 
than the others, he is what I have called a picture rather 
than a character. Judge Pyncheon is an ironical portrait, 
very richly and broadly executed, very sagaciously com- 
posed and rendered — the portrait of a superb, full-blown 
hypocrite, a large-based, full-nurtured Pharisee, bland, ur- 
bane, impressive, difEusing about him a " sultry " warmth 
of benevolence, as the author calls it again and again, and 
basking in the noontide of prosperity and the considera- 
tion of society; but in reality hard, gross, and ignoble. 
Judge Pyncheon is an elaborate piece of description, made 
up of a hundred admirable touches, in whic-h satire is al- 
ways winged with fancy, and fancy is linked with a deep 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 125 

sense of reality. It is difficult to say whether Hawthorne 
followed a model in describing Judge Pyncheon ; but it is 
tolerably obvious that the picture is an impression — a copi- 
ous impression— of an individual. It has evidently a defi- 
nite starting-point in fact, and the author is able to draw, 
freely and confidently, after the image established in his 
mind. Holgrave, the modern young man, who has been a 
Jack-of-all-trades, and is at the period of the story a da- 
guerreotypist, is an attempt to render a kind of national 
type — that of the young citizen of the United States whose 
fortune is simply in his lively intelligence, and who stands 
naked, as it were, unbiased and unencumbered alike, in the 
centre of the far-stretching level of American life. Hol- 
grave is intended as a contrast ; his lack of traditions, his 
democratic stamp, his condensed experience, are opposed to 
the desiccated prejudices and exhausted vitality of the race 
of which poor feebly-scowling, rusty-jointed Hephzibah is 
the most heroic representative. It is, perhaps, a pity that 
Hawthorne should not have proposed to himself to give the 
old Pyncheon qualities some embodiment which would help 
them to balance more fairly with the elastic properties of 
the young daguerreotypist — should not have painted a 
lusty conservative to match his strenuous radical. As it 
is, the miistiness and mouldiness of the tenants of the 
House of the Seven Gables crumble away rather too ea- 
sily. Evidently, however, what Hawthorne designed to 
represent was not the struggle between an old society and 
a new, for in this case he would have given the old one a 
better chance ; but simply, as I have said, the shrinkage 
and extinction of a family. This appealed to his imagina- 
tion ; and the idea of long perpetuation and survival al- 
ways appears to have filled him with a kind of horror and 
disapproval. Conservative, in a certain degree, as he was 



126 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

himself, and fond of retrospect and quietude and the mel- 
lowing influences of time, it is singular how often one en- 
counters in his writings some expression of mistrust of old 
houses, old institutions, long lines of descent. He was dis- 
posed, apparently, to allow a ver}'- moderate measure in these 
respects, and he condemns the dwelling of the Pyncheons 
to disappear from the face of the earth because it has been 
standing a couple of hundred years. In this he was an 
American of Americans ; or, rather, he was more American 
than many of his countrymen, who, though they are ac- 
customed to work for the short run rather than the long, 
have often a lurking esteem for things that show the marks 
of having lasted. I will add that Holgrave is one of the 
few figures, among those which Hawthorne created, with 
regard to which the absence of the realistic mode of treat- 
ment is felt as a loss. Holgrave is not sharply enough char- 
acterised; he lacks features; he is not an individual, but a 
type. But my last word about this admirable novel must 
not be a restrictive one. It is a large and generous pro- 
duction, pervaded with that vague hum, that indefinable 
echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man, which is the 
real sign of a great work of fiction. 

After the publication of The House of the Seven Gables^ 
which brought him great honour, and, I believe, a tolerable 
share of a more ponderable substance, he composed a couple 
of little volumes for children — The Wonder-Book, sindi a 
small collection of stories entitled Tanglewood Tales. They 
are not among his most serious literary titles, but if I may 
trust my own early impression of them, they are among 
the most charming literary services that have been render- 
ed to children in an age (and especially in a country) in 
which the exactions of the infant mind have exerted much 
too palpable an influence upon literature. Hawthorne's 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 127 

stones are the old Greek myths, made more vivid to the 
childish imagination by an infusion of details which both 
deepen and explain their marvels. I have been careful not 
to read them over, for I should be very sorry to risk dis- 
turbing in any degree a recollection of them that has been 
at rest since the appreciative period of life to which they 
are addressed. They seem at that period enchanting, and 
the ideal of happiness of many American children is to 
lie upon the carpet and lose themselves in The Wonder- 
Book. It is in its pages that they first make the ac- 
quaintance of the heroes and heroines of the antique 
mythology, and something of the Hursery fairy-tale qual- 
ity of interest which Hawthorne imparts to them always 
remains. 

I have said that Lenox was a very pretty place, and that 
he was able to work there Hawthorne proved by composing 
The House of the Seven Gables with a good deal of rapid- 
ity. But, at the close of the year in which this novel was 
published, he wTote to a friend (Mr. Fields, his publisher) 
that, " to tell you a secret, I am sick to death of Berkshire, 
and hate to think of spending another winter here. . . . 
The air and climate do not agree with my health at all, 
and for the first time since I was a boy I have felt languid 
and dispirited. . . . O that Providence would build me the 
merest little shanty, and mark me out a rood or two of 
garden ground, near the sea-coast !" He was at this time 
for a while out of health ; and it is proper to remember 
that though the Massachusetts Berkshire, with its moun-^ 
tains and lakes, was charming during the ardent American 
summer, there was a reverse to the medal, consisting of 
December snows prolonged into April and May. Provi- 
dence failed to provide him with a cottage by the sea; 
but he betook himself for the winter of 1852 to the little 



128 HAWTHOENE. [chap. 

town of West Newton, near Boston, where he brought 
into the world The Blithedale Romance. 

This work, as I have said, would not have been written 
if Hawthorne had not spent a year at Brook Farm, and 
though it is in no sense of the word an account of the 
manners or the inmates of that establishment, it will pre- 
serve the memory of the ingenious community at West 
Roxbury for a generation unconscious of other reminders. 
I hardly know what to say about it, save that it is very 
charming ; this vague, unanalytic epithet is the first that 
comes to one's pen in treating of Hawthorne's novels, foi* 
their extreme amenity of form invariably suggests it ; but 
if, on the one hand, it claims to be uttered, on the other it 
frankly confesses its inconclusiveness. Perhaps, however, 
in this case it fills out the measure of appreciation more 
completely than in others, for The Blithedale Romance is 
the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest, of this company of 
unhumorous fictions. 

The story is told from a more joyous point of view — 
from a point of view comparatively humorous — and a 
number of objects and incidents touched wdth the light of 
the profane world — the vulgar, many -coloured world of 
actuality, as distinguished from the crepuscular realm of 
the writer's own reveries — are mingled with its course. 
The book, indeed, is a mixture of elements, and it leaves in 
the memory an impression analogous to that of an April 
day — an alternation of brightness and shadow, of brokon 
sun - patches and sprinkling clouds. Its denoument is 
tragical — there is, indeed, nothing so tragical in all Hatv- 
thorne, unless it be the murder of Miriam's persecutor by 
Donatello, in Transformation, as the suicide of Zenobia ; 
and yet, on the whole, the effect of the novel is to make 
one think more agreeably of life. The standpoint of the 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 129 

narrator has the advantage of being a concrete one ; he is 
no longer, as in the preceding tales, a disembodied spirit, 
imprisoned in the haunted chamber of his own contempla- 
tions, but a particular man, with a certain human grossness. 
Of Miles Coverdale I have already spoken, and of its be- 
ing natural to assume that, in so far as we may measure 
this lightly indicated identity of his, it has a great deal in 
common with that of his creator. Coverdale is a picture 
of the contemplative, observant, analytic nature, nursing- 
its fancies, and yet, thanks to an element of strong good 
sense, not bringing them up to be spoiled children ; hav- 
ing little at stake in life, at any given moment, and yet 
indulging, in imagination, in a good many adventures; a 
portrait of a man, in a word, whose passions are slender, 
whose imagination is active, and whose happiness lies, not 
in doing, but in perceiving — half a poet, half a critic, and 
all a spectator. He is contrasted excellently with the fig- 
ure of Hollingsworth, the heavily treading Reformer, whose 
attitude w^ith regard to the world is that of the hammer to 
the anvil, and who has no patience with his friend's indif- 
ferences and neutralities. Coverdale is a gentle sceptic, a 
mild cynic ; he would agree that life is a little worth liv- v 
ing — or worth living a little ; but would remark that, un- 
fortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great 
deal. He confesses to a want of earnestness, but in reali- 
ty he is evidently an excellent fellow, to whom one might 
look, not for any personal performance on a great scale, 
but for a good deal of generosity of detail. "As Hollings- 
worth once told me, I lack a purpose," he writes, at the 
close of his story. "How strange ! He was ruined, mor- 
ally, by an overplus of the same ingredient the want of 
which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life 
all an emptiness, I by no means wish to die. Yet, wer« 



130 HAWTHORNE. ' [chap. 

there any cause in this whole chaos of human struggle 
worth a sane man's dying for, and which my death would 
benefit, then — provided, however, the effort did not involve 
an unreasonable amount of trouble — methinks I might be 
bold to offer up my life. If Kossuth, for example, would 
pitch the battle-field of Hungarian rights within an easy 
ride of my abode, and choose a mild, sunny morning, after 
breakfast, for the conflict. Miles Coverdale would gladly 
be his man for one brave rush upon the levelled bayonets. 
Further than that I should be loth to pledge myself." 

The finest thinij in The Blithedale Romance is the char- 
acter of Zenobia, which I have said elsewhere strikes me 
as the nearest approach that Hawthorne has made to the 
complete creation of a person. She is more concrete than 
Hester or Miriam, or Hilda or Phoebe ; she is a more defi- 
nite image, produced by a greater multiplicity of touches. 
It is idle to inquire too closely whether Hawthorne had 
Margaret Fuller in his mind in constructing the figure of 
this brilliant specimen of the strong-minded class, and en- 
dowing her with the genius of conversation ; or, on the as- 
sumption that such was the case, to compare the image at 
all strictly with the model. There is no strictness in* the 
representation by novelists of persons who have struck 
them in life, and there can in the nature of things be none. 
From the moment the imagination takes a hand in the 
game, the inevitable tendency is to divergence, to follow- 
ing what may be called new scents. The original gives 
hints, but the writer does what he likes with them, and 
imports new elements into the picture. If there is this 
amount of reason for referring the wayward heroine of 
Blithedale to Hawthorne's impression of the most distin- 
guished woman of her day in Boston ; that Margaret Fuller 
was the only literary lady of eminence whom there is any 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 131 

sign of his having known ; that she was proud, passionate, 
and eloquent ; that she was much connected with the little 
world of Transcendentalism out of which the experiment 
of Brook Farm sprung ; and that she had a miserable end 
and a watery grave — if these are facts to be noted on 
one side, I say ; on the other, the beautiful and sumptuous 
Zenobia, with her rich and picturesque temperament and 
physical aspects, offers many points of divergence from 
the plain and strenuous invalid who represented feminine 
culture in the suburbs of the New England metropolis. 
This picturesqueness of Zenobia is very happily indicated 
and maintained; she is a woman in all the force of the 
term, and there is something very vivid and powerful in 
her large expression of w^omanly gifts and weaknesses. 
Hollingsworth is, I think, less successful, though there is 
much reality in the conception of the type to which he 
belongs — the strong-willed, narrow - hearted apostle of a 
special form of redemption for society. There is nothing 
better in all Hawthorne than the scene between him and 
Coverdale, when the two men are at work together in the 
field (piling stones on a dyke), and he gives it to his com- 
panion to choose whether he will be with him or against 
him. It is a pity, perhaps, to have represented him as 
having begun life as a blacksmith, for one grudges him 
the advantage of so logical a reason for his roughness and 
hardness. 

" Hollingsworth scarcely said a word, unless when repeat- 
edly and pertinaciously addressed. Then, indeed, he would 
glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his meditations, 
like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply possible, 
and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and 
mind. . . . His heart, I imagine, was never really interested in 
our socialist scheme, but was for ever busy with his strange 



132 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

and, as most people tliought, impracticable plan for the ref- 
ormation of criminals through an appeal to their liiglier in- 
stincts. Much as I liked HoUingsworth, it cost me many a 
groan to tolerate him on this point. He ought to have com- 
menced his investigation of the subject by committing some 
huge sin in his proper person, and examining the condition 
of his higher instincts afterwards.'" 

The most touching element in the novel is the history 
of the grasp that this barbarous fanatic has laid upon the 
fastidious and high - tempered Zenobia, who, disliking him 
and shrinking from him at a hundred points, is drawn into 
the gulf of his omnivorous egotism. The portion of the 
story that strikes me as least felicitous is that which deals 
with Priscilla, and with her mysterious relation to Zenobia 
— with her mesmeric gifts, her clairvoyance, her identity 
with the Veiled Lady, her divided subjection to HoUings- 
worth and Westervelt, and her numerous other graceful 
but fantastic properties — her Sibylline attributes, as the 
author calls them. Hawthorne is rather too fond of Sibyl- 
line attributes — a taste of the same order as his disposi- 
tion, to which I have already alluded, to talk about spheres 
and sympathies. As the action advances, in The Blithe- 
dale Romance, we get too much out of reality, and cease 
to feel beneath our feet the firm ground of an appeal to 
our own vision of the world — our observation. I should 
have liked to see the story concern itself more with the 
little community in which its earlier scenes are laid, and 
avail itself of so excellent an opportunity for describing 
unhackneyed specimens of human nature. I have already 
spoken of the absence of satire in the novel, of its not aim- 
ing in the least at satire, and of its offering no grounds for 
complaint as an invidious picture. Indeed, the brethren of 
Brook Farm should have held themselves slio-hted rather 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 133 

than misrepresented, and have regretted that the admirable 
genius who for a while was nunibered among them should 
have treated their institution mainly as a perch for start- 
ing upon an imaginative flight. But when all is said 
about a certain want of substance and cohesion in the 
latter portions of The Blithedale Romance, the book is 
still* a delightful and beautiful one. Zenobia and Hol- 
lingsworth live in the memory; and even Priscilla and 
Coverdale, who linger there less importunatel}?", have a 
great deal that touches us and that we believe in. I 
said just now that Priscilla was infelicitous; but immedi- 
ately afterwards I open the volume at a page in which the 
author describes some of the out-of-door amusements at 
Blithedale, and speaks of a foot-race across the grass, in 
which some of the slim young girls of the society joined. 
" Priscilla's peculiar charm in a foot-race was the weakness 
and irregularity with which she ran. Growing up without 
exercise, except to her poor little fingers, she had never yet 
acquired the perfect use of her legs. Setting buoyantly 
forth, therefore, as if no rival less swift than Atalanta 
could compete with her, she ran falteringly, and often 
tumbled on the grass. Such an incident — though it 
seems too slight to think of — was a thing to laugh at, 
but which brought the water into one's eyes, and lingered 
in the memory after far greater joys and sorrows were 
wept out of it, as antiquated trash. Priscilla's life, as I 
beheld it, was full of trifles that affected me in just this 
way." That seems to me exquisite, and the book is full 
of touches as deep and delicate. 

After writing it, Hawthorne went back to live in Con- 
cord, where he had bought a small house, in whicli, appar- 
ently, he expected to spend a large portion of his fiitui-e. 
This was, in fact, the dwelling in which he passed that 



HAWTHORNE. :^^^ j-^^g^p 

part of the rest of his days that he spent in his own 
country. He established himself there before going to 
Europe, in 1853, and he returned to the Wayside, as he 
called his house, on coming back to the United States 
seven years later. Though he actually occupied the place 
no long time, he had made it his property, and it was more 
his own home than any of his numerous provisional abodes. 
I may, therefore, quote a little account of the house which 
he wrote to a distinguished friend, Mr. George William 
Curtis. 

" As for my old house, you wdll understand it better after 
spending a' day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in 
hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with tw'o peaked gables ; 
no suggestiveness about it, and no venerableness, although 
from the style of its construction it seems to have survived 
beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a 
central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty 
olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesque- 
ness ; all which improvements, together with its situation at 
the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices 
and remembers for a few moments after passing. Mr, Alcott 
expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no great 
purpose) in forming the hillside behind the house into ter- 
races, and building arbours and summer-houses of rough stems, 
and branches, and trees, on a sj^stem of his own. They must 
have been very pretty in their day, and are so still, although 
much decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze 
that blows. The hillside is covered chiefly with locust-trees, 
wiiich come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, 
and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed with a few 
young elms, and white pines and infant oaks — the whole 
forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there 
is some very good shade to be found there. I spend delec- 
table hours there in the hottest part of the day, stretched out 
at my lazy length, with a book in my hand, or some unwrit- 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 135 

ten book in my thoughts. There is ahnost always a breeze 
stirring along the sides or brow of the hill. From the hill- 
top there is a good view along the extensive level surfaces 
and gentle hilly outlines, covered with wood, that character- 
ise the scenery of Concord. ... I know nothing of the history 
of the house except Thoreau's telling me that it was inhabit- 
ed, a century or two ago, by a man who believed he should 
never die. I believe, however, he is dead ; at least, I hope 
so ; else he may probably reappear and dispute my title to 
his residence." 

As Mr. Lathrop points out, this allusion to a man who 
believed he should never die is " the first intimation of the 
story of Septimius Feltonr The scenery of that romance, 
he adds, " was evidently taken from the Wayside and its 
hill." Septimiua Felton is, in fact, a young man who, at 
the time of the war of the Revolution, lives in the village 
of Concord, on the Boston road, at the base of a woody 
hill which rises abruptly behind his house, and of which 
the level summit supplies him with a promenade continu- 
ally mentioned in the course of the tale. Hawthorne used 
to exercise himself upon this picturesque eminence, and, as 
he conceived the brooding Septimius to have done before 
him, to betake himself thither when he found the limits of 
his dwellincr too narrow. But he had an advantage which 
his imaginary hero lacked; he erected a tower as an ad- 
junct to the house, and it was a jocular tradition among 
his neighbours, in allusion to his attributive tendency to 
evade rather than hasten the coming guest, that he used to 
ascend this structure and scan the road for provocations 
to retreat. 

In so far, however, as Hawthoriie suffered the penalties 
of celebrity at the hands of intrusive fellow -citizens, he 
was soon to escape from this honourable incommodity. 



136 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

On the 4tli of March, 1853, liis old college-mate and inti- 
mate? friend, Franklin Pierce, was installed as President of 
the United States. He had been the candidate of the 
Democratic party, and all good Democrats, accordingly, in 
conformity to the beautiful and rational system under 
which the affairs of the great Republic were carried on, 
began to open their windows to the golden sunshme of 
Presidential patronage. When General Pierce was put 
forward by the Democrats, Hawthorne felt a perfectly 
loyal and natural desire that his good friend should be 
exalted to so brilliant a position, and he did what was in 
him to further the good cause, by writing a little book 
about its hero. His Life of Franklin Pierce belongs to 
that class of literature which is known as the " campaign 
biography," and which consists of an attempt, more or less 
successful, to persuade the many-headed monster of uni- 
versal suffrage that the gentleman on whose behalf it is 
addressed is a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Of Haw- 
thorne's little book there is nothing particular to say, save 
that it is in very good taste, that he is a very fairly in- 
genious advocate, and that if he claimed for the future 
President qualities which rather faded in the bright light 
of a high office, this defect of proportion was essential to 
his undertaking. He dwelt chiefly upon General Pierce's 
exploits in the war with Mexico (before that, his record, 
as they say in America, had been mainly that of a success- 
ful country lawyer), and exercised his descriptive powers, 
so far as was possible, in describing the advance of the 
United States troops from Vera Cruz to the city of the 
Montezumas. The mouth-pieces of the Whig party spared 
him, I believe, no reprobation for " prostituting " his ex- 
quisite genius ; but I fail to see anything reprehensible in 
Hawthorne's lendino^ his old friend the assistance of his 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. I'Sl 

graceful quilj. He wished him to be President — he held 
afterwards that he filled the office with admirable dignity 
and wisdom — and as the only thing he could do was to 
write, he fell to work and wrote for him. Hawthorne 
was a good lover and a very sufficient partisan, and I sus- 
pect that if Fi'anldin Pierce had been made even less of 
the stuff of a statesman, he would still have found in the 
force of old associations an injunction to hail him as a 
ruler. Oar hero was an American of the earlier and sim- 
pler type — the type of which it is doubtless premature to 
say that it has wholly passed away, but of which it may 
at least be said that the circumstances that produced it 
have been greatly modified. The generation to which he 
belonged, that generation which grew up with the cen- 
tury, witnessed daring a period of fifty years the immense, 
uninterrupted material development of the young Repub- 
lic ; and when one thinks of the scale on which it took 
place, of the prosperity that walked in its train and waited 
on its course, of the hopes it fostered and the blessings it 
conferred — of the broad morning sunshine, in a word, in 
which it all went forward — there seems to be little room 
for surprise that it shouM have implanted a kind of super- 
stitious faith in the grandeur of the country, its duration, 
its immunity from the usual troubles of earthly empires. 
This faith was a simple and uncritical one, enlivened with 
an element of genial optimism, in the light of which it 
appeared that the great American state was not as other 
human institutions are, that a special Providence watched 
over it, that it would go on joyously forever, and that a 
country whose vast and blooming bosom offered a refuge 
to the strugglers and seekers of all the rest of the world, 
must come off easily, in the battle of the ages. From this 
conception of the American future the sense of its having 
K 7 



138 HAWTHORNE. [ch^p. 

problems to solve was blissfully absent; there were no 
diflBculties in the programme, no looming complications, 
no rocks ahead. The indefinite multiplication of the 
population, and its enjoyment of the benefits of a com- 
mon-school education and of unusual facilities for making 
an income — this was the form in which, on the whole, the 
future most vividly presented itself, and in which the great- 
ness of the country was to be recognised of men. There 
was, indeed, a faint shadow in the picture — the shadow 
projected by the " peculiar institution " of the Southern 
States ; but it was far from suflScient to darken the rosy 
vision of most good Americans, and, above all, of most 
good Democrats. Hawthorne alludes to it in a passage 
of his life of Pierce, which I will quote, not only as a hint 
of the trouble that was in store for a cheerful race of men, 
but as an example of his own easy-going political attitude. 

"It was while in the Lower House of Congress that 
Franklin Pierce took that stand on the Slavery question 
from which he has never since swerved by a hair's breadth. 
He fully recognised, by his votes and his voice, the rights 
pledged to the South by the Constitution. This, at the 
period when he declared himself, was an easy thing to do. 
But when it became more difficult, when the first impercepti- 
ble murmur of agitation had grown almost to a convulsion, 
his course was still the same. Nor did he ever shun the 
obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the Northern 
man who dared to love that great and sacred reality — his 
whole united country — better than the mistiness of a philan- 
thropic theory." 

This last invidious allusion is to the disposition, not in- 
frequent at the North, but by no means general, to set a 
decisive limit to further legislation in favour of the cherish- 
ed idiosyncrasy of the other half of the country. Haw- 



T.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. 139 

tliorne takes the license of a sympathetic biographer in 
speaking of his hero's having incurred obloquy by his 
conservative attitude on the question of Slavery. The 
only class in the American world that suffered in the 
smallest degree, at this time, from social persecution, was 
the little band of Northern Abolitionists, who were as 
unfashionable* as they were indiscreet — which is saying 
much. Like most of his fellow-countrymen, Hawthorne 
had no idea that the respectable institution which he con- 
templated in impressive contrast to humanitarian " misti- 
ness," was presently to cost the nation four long years of 
bloodshed and misery, and a social revolution as complete 
as any the world has seen. When this event occurred, he 
was, therefore, proportionately horrified and depressed by 
it ; it cut from beneath his feet the familiar ground which 
had long felt so firm, substituting a heaving and quaking 
medium in which his spirit found no rest. Such was the 
bewildered sensation of that earlier and simpler generation 
of which I have spoken; their illusions were rudely dis- 
pelled, and they saw the best of all possible republics giv- 
en over to fratricidal carnage. This affair had no place in 
their scheme, and nothing was left for them but to hang 
their heads and close their eyes. The subsidence of that 
great convulsion has left a different tone from the tone it 
found, and one may say that the Civil War marks an era 
in the history of the American mind. It introduced into 
the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion 
and relation, of the world being a moi'e complicated place 
than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, 
success more difficult. At the rate at which things are 
going, it is obvious that good Americans will be more nu- 
merous than ever; but the good American, in days to 
come, will be a more critical person than his complacent 



140 HAWTIlOKxXE. [chap. 

and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of 
knowledge. He will not, I think, be a sceptic, and still 
less, of course, a cynic ; but he will be, without discredit 
to his well-known capacity for action, an observer. He 
will remember that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, 
•and that this is a world in which everything happens ; 
and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French used 
to say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The 
good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a 
specimen was not critical, and it was perhaps for this rea- 
son that Franklin Pierce seemed to him a very proper 
President. 

The least that General Pierce could do in exchange for 
so liberal a confidence was to offer his old friend one of 
the numerous places in his gift. Hawthorne had a great 
desire to go abroad and see something of the world, so 
that a consulate seemed the proper thing. He never stir- 
red in the matter himself, but his friends strongly urged 
that something should be done; and when he accepted 
the post of consul at Liverpool there was not a word of 
reasonable criticism to be offered on the matter. If Gen- 
eral Pierce, who was before all things good-natured and 
obliging, had been guilty of no greater indiscretion than 
to confer this modest distinction upon the most honourable 
and discreet of men of letters, he would have made a more 
brilliant mark in the annals of American statesmanship. 
Liverpool had not been immediately selected, and Haw- 
thorne had written to his friend and publisher, Mr. Fields, 
with some humorous vagueness of allusion to his probable 
expatriation. 

" Do make some inquiries about Portugal ; as, for instance, 
in what part of the world it lies, and whether it is an empire, 
a kingdom, or a republic. Also, and more particularly, the 



v.] THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS, 141 

expenses of living there, and whether the Minister would be 
likely to be much pestered with his own countrymen. Also, 
any other information about foreign countries would be ac- 
ceptable to an inquiring mind." 

It would seem from this that there had been a question 
of offering him a small diplomatic post ; but the emolu- 
ments of the place were justly taken into account, and it 
is to be supposed that those of the consulate at Liverpool 
were at least as great as the salary of the American repre- 
sentative at Lisbon. Unfortunately, just after Hawthorne 
had taken possession of the former post, the salary attach- 
ed to it was reduced by Congress, in an economical hour, 
to less, than half the sum enjoyed by his predecessors. It 
was fixed at $7,500 (£1,500) ; but the consular fees, which 
were often copious, were an added resource. At midsum- 
mer then, in 1853, Hawthorne was established in England. 



CHAPTER VI. 

ENGLAND AND ITALY. 

Hawthorne was close upon fifty years of age wlien he 
came to Europe — a fact that should be remembered when 
those impressions which he recorded in fivb substantial 
volumes (exclusive of the novel written in Italy), occasion- 
ally affect us by the rigidity of their point of view. His 
Note-Books, kept during his residence in England, his two 
winters in Rome, his summer in Florence, were published 
after his death ; his impressions of England, sifted, re- 
vised, and addressed directly to the public, he gave to the 
world shortly before this event. The tone of his Euro- 
pean Diaries is often so fresh and unsophisticated that we 
find ourselves thinking of the writer as a young man, and 
it is only a certain final sense of something reflective and 
a trifle melancholy that reminds us that the simplicity 
which is, on the whole, the leading characteristic of their 
pages is, though the simplicity of inexperience, not that 
of youth. When I say inexperience, I mean that Haw- 
thorne's experience had been narrow. His fifty years had 
been spent, for much the larger part, in small American 
towns — Salem, the Boston of forty years ago, Concord, 
Lenox, West Newton — and he had led exclusively what 
one may call a village life. This is evident, not at all di- 
rectly and superficially, but by implication and between 



CHAP. VI.] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 143 

the lines, in his desultory history of his foreign years. In 
other words, and to call things by their names, he was ex- 
quisitely and consistently provincial. I suggest this fact 
not in the least in condemnation, but, on the contrary, in 
support 6f an appreciative view of him. I know nothing 
more remarkable, more touching, than the sight of this 
odd, youthful-elderly mind, contending so late in the day 
with new opportunities for learning old things, and, on the 
whole, profiting by them so freely and gracefully. The 
Note-Books are provincial, and so, in a greatly modified 
degree, are the sketches of England, in Our Old Home; 
but the beauty and delicacy of this latter work are so in- 
terwoven with the author's air of being remotely outside of 
everything he describes, that they count for more, seem 
more themselves, and finally give the whole thing the ap- 
pearance of a triumph, not of initiation, but of the provin- 
cial point of view itself. 

I shall not attempt to relate in detail the incidents of 
his residence in England. He appears to have enjoyed 
it greatly, in spite of the deficiency of charm in the place 
to which his duties chiefly confined him. His confine- 
ment, however, was not unbroken, and his published Jour- 
nals consist largely of minute accounts of little journeys and 
wanderings, with his wife and his three children, through 
the rest of the country; together with much mention of 
numerous visits to London, a city for whose dusky im- 
mensity and multitudinous interest he professed the high- 
est relish. His Note-Books are of the same cast as the 
two volumes of his American Diaries, of which I have 
given some account — chiefly occupied with external mat- 
ters, with the accidents of daily life, with observations 
made during the long walks (often with his son) which 
formed his most valued pastime. His office, moreover, 



144 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

though Liverpool was not a delectable home, furnished 
him with entertainment as well as occupation, and it may 
almost be said that during these years he saw more of his 
fellow-countrymen, in the shape of odd wanderers, peti- 
tioners, and inquirers of every kind, than he had e^er done 
in his native land. The paper entitled " Consular Experi- 
ences," in Our Old Home, is an admirable recital of these 
observations, and a proof that the novelist might have 
found much material in the opportunities of the consul. 
On his return to America, in 1860, he drew from his 
Journal a number of pages relating to his observations in 
England, re-wrote them (with, I should suppose, a good 
deal of care), and converted them into articles which he 
published in a magazine. These chapters were afterwards 
collected, and Our Old Home (a rather infelicitous title) 
was issued in 1863. I prefer to speak of the book now, 
however, rather than in touching upon the closing years of 
his life, for it is a kind of deliberate resume of his impres- 
sions of the land of his ancestors. "It is not a good or 
a weighty book," he wrote to his publisher, who had sent 
him some reviews of it, "nor does it deserve any great 
amount of praise or censure. I don't care about seeing 
any more notices of it." Hawthorne's appreciation of his 
own productions was always extremely just; he had a 
sense of the relations of things, which some of his admir- 
ers have not thought it well to cultivate ; and he never ex- 
aggerated his own importance as a writer. Our Old Home 
is not a weighty book ; it is decidedly a light one. But 
when he says it is not a good one, I hardly know what he 
means, and his modesty at this point is in excess of his dis- 
cretion. Whether good or not. Our Old Home is charm- 
ing — it is most delectable reading. The execution is sin- 
gularly perfect and ripe ; of all his productions it seems to 



VI.] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 145 

be the best written. The touch, as musicians say, is ad- 
mirable; the lightness, the fineness, the felicity of charac- 
terisation and description, belong to a man who has the 
adv^antage of feeling delicately. His judgment is b}' no 
means always sound; it often rests on too narrow an obser- 
vation. But his perception is of the 'keenest, and though 
it is frequently partial, incomplete, it is excellent as far as 
it goes. The book gave but limited satisfaction, I believe, 
in England, and I am not sure that the failure to enjoy 
certain manifestations of its sportive irony has not chilled 
the appreciation of its singular grace. That English read- 
ers, on the whole, should have felt that Hawthorne did the 
national mind and manners but partial justice, is, I think, 
conceivable ; at the same time that it seems to me remark- 
able that the tender side of the book, as I may call it, 
should not have carried it off better. It abounds in pas- 
sages more delicately appreciative than can easily be found 
elsewhere, and it contains more charming and affectionate 
things than, I should suppose, had ever before been written 
about a country not the writer's own. To say that it is 
an immeasurably more exquisite and sympathetic work 
than any of the numerous persons who have related their 
misadventures in the United States have seen fit to de- 
vote to that country, is to say but little, and I imagine 
that Hawthorne had in mind the array of English voy- 
agers — Mrs. TroUope, Dickens, Marryat, Basil Hall, Miss 
Martineau, Mr. Grattan — when he reflected that everything 
is' relative, and that, as such books go, his own little volume 
observed the amenities of criticism. He certainly had it 
in mind when he wrote the phrase in his preface relat- 
ing to the impression the book might make 'in England. 
" Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America for 
courtesy's sake or kindness ; nor, in my opinion, would it 
1* 



146 HAWTflORNIl. [chap. 

contribute in the least to any mutual advantage and com- 
fort if we were to besmear each other all over with butter 
and honey." I am far from intending to intimate that the 
vulgar instinct of recrimination had anything to do with 
the restrictive passages of Our Old Home ; I mean sim- 
ply, that the author had a prevision that his collection of 
sketches would in some particulars fail to please his Eng- 
lish friends. He professed, after the event, to have dis- 
covered that the English are sensitive, and as they say of 
the Americans, for whose advantage I believe the term 
was invented, thin skinned. " The English critics," he 
wrote to his publisher, " seem to think me very bitter 
against their countrymen, and it is perhaps natural that 
they should, because their self-conceit can accept nothing- 
short of indiscriminate adulation ; but I really think that 
Americans have much more cause than they to complain 
of me. Looking over the volume, I am rather surprised to 
find that, whenever I draw a comparison between the two 
people, I almost invariably cast the balance against our- 
selves." And he writes at another time : — " I received 
several private letters and printed notices of Our Old 
Home from England. It is laughable to see the innocent 
wonder with which they regard my criticisms, accounting 
for them by jaundice, insanity, jealousy, hatred, on my 
part, and never admitting the least suspicion that there 
may be a particle of truth in them. The monstrosity of 
their self-conceit is such that anything short of unlimited 
admiration impresses them as malicious caricature. But 
they do me great injustice in supposing that I hate them. 
I would as soon hate my own people." The idea of his 
hating the English was of course too puerile for discus- 
sion ; and the book, as I have said, is full of a rich appre- 
ciation of the finest characteristics of the country. But 



Tj.] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 147 

it has a serious defect — a defect whicli impairs its value, 
though it helps to give consistency to such an image of 
Hawthorne's personal nature as we may by this time have 
been able to form. It is the work of an outsider, of a 
stranger, of a man who remains to the end a mere specta- 
tor (something less even than an observer), and always lacks 
the final initiation into the manners and nature of a peo- 
ple of whom it may most be said, among all the people of 
the earth, that to know them is to make discoveries. Haw- 
thorne freely confesses to this constant exteriority, and ap- 
pears to have been perfectly conscious of it. " I remem- 
ber," he writes in the sketch of " A London Suburb," in 
Our Old Home — " I remember to this day the dreary feel- 
ing with which I sat by our first English fireside and 
watched the chill and rainy twilight of an autumn day 
darkening down upon the garden, while the preceding oc- 
cupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable person- 
age in his lifetime), scowled inhospitably from above the 
mantel-piece, as if indignant that an American should try 
.to make himself at home there. Possibly it may appease 
his sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode as much 
a stranger as I entered it." The same note is struck in an 
entry in his Journal, of the date of October 6th, 1854. 

"The people, for several days, have been in the utmost 
anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation, about Se- 
bastopol — and all England, and Europe to boot, have been 
fooled by the belief that it had fallen. This, however, now 
turns out to be incorrect ; and the public visage is some- 
what grim in consequence. I am glad of it. In spite of his 
actual sympathies, it is impossible for an American to be 
otherwise than glad. Success makes an Englishman intoler- 
able, and already, on the mistaken idea that the way was 
open to a prosperous conclusion of the war, the Times had 



148 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never 
love England till she sues to us for help, and, in the mean- 
time, the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all par- 
ties. An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable 
character ; he does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to 
a proper conception of himself. ... I seem to myself like a 
spy or traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that 
I neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although 
they look at me in full confidence of sympathy. Their heart 
' know^eth its own bitterness ;' and as for me, being a stran- 
ger and an alien, I ' intermeddle not with their joy.' " 

This seems 'to me to express very well the weak side 
of Hawthorne's work — his constant mistrust and suspi- 
cion of the society that surrounded him, his exaggerated, 
painful, morbid national consciousness. It is, I think, an 
indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the 
most self-conscious people in the world, and the most ad- 
dicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are 
in a conspiracy to undervalue them. They are conscious 
of being the youngest of the great nations, of not being 
of the European family, of being placed on the circum- 
ference of the circle of civilisation rather than at the cen- 
tre, of the experimental element not having as yet entirely 
dropped out of their great political undertaking. The 
sense of this relativity, in a word, replaces that quiet and 
comfortable sense of the absolute, as regards its own posi- 
tion in the world, which reigns supreme in the British and 
in the Gallic genius. Few persons, I think, can have min- 
gled much with Americans in Europe without having 
made this reflection, and it is in England that their habit 
of looking askance at foreign institutions — of keeping one 
eye, as it were, on the American personality, while with 
the other they contemplate these objects — is most to be 



VI.] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 149 

observed. Add to this that Hawthorne came to England 
late in life, when his habits, his tastes, his opinions, were 
already formed, that he was inclined to look at things in 
silence and brood over them gently, rather than talk about 
them, discnss them, grow acquainted with them by ac- 
tion ; and it will be possible to form an idea of our 
writer's detached and critical attitude in the country in 
which it is easiest, thanks to its aristocratic constitution, 
to the absence of any considerable public fund of enter- 
tainment and diversion, to the degree in which the inex- 
haustible beauty and interest of the place are private prop- 
erty, demanding constantly a special introduction — in the 
country in which, I say, it is easiest for a stranger to re- 
main a stranger. For a stranger to cease to be a stranger 
he must stand ready, as the French say, to pay with his 
person ; and this was an obligation that Hawthorne was 
indisposed to incur. Our sense, as we read, that his reflec- 
tions are those of a shy and susceptible man, wnth nothing 
at stake, mentally, in his appreciation of the country, is, 
therefore, a drawback to our confidence ; but it is not a , 
drawback sufficient to make it of no importance that he 
is at the same time singularly intelligent and discrimi- 
nating, with a faculty of feeling dehcately and justly, 
which constitutes in itself an illumination. There is a 
passage in the sketch entitled About Warwick which is a 
very good instance of what was probably his usual state 
of mind. He is speaking of the aspect of the High Street 
of the town. 

" The street is an emblem of England itself. What seems 
new in it is chiefly a skilful and fortunate adaptation of 
what such a people as ourselves would destroy. The new 
things are based and supported on sturdy old things, and 
derive a massive strength from their deep and immemorial 



150 HAWTHORNE. .[chap. 

foundations, though with such limitations and impediments 
as only an Englishman could endure. But he likes to feel 
the weight of all the past upon his back ; and, moreover, the 
antiquity that overburdens him has taken root in his being, 
and has grown to be rather a humjj than a pack, so that 
there is no getting rid of it without tearing his whole struct- 
ure to pieces. In my judgment, as he appears to be suffi- 
ciently comfortable under the mouldy accretion, he had bet- 
ter stumble on with it as long as he can. He presents a spec- 
tacle which is by no means without its charm for a disin- 
terested and unincumbered observer." 

There is all Hawthorne, with his enjoyment- of tbe 
picturesque, his relish of chiaroscuro, of local colour, of 
the deposit of time, and his still greater enjoyment of 
his own dissociation from these things, his " disinterest- 
ed and unincumbered" condition. His want of incum- 
brances may seem at times to give him a somewhat naked 
and attenuated appearance, but, on the whole, he carries it 
off very well. I have said that Our Old Home contains 
much of his best writinof, and on turnino- over the book at 
hazard, I am struck with his frequent felicity of phrase. 
At every step there is something one would like to quote 
— something excellently well said. These things are often 
of the lighter sort, but Hawthorne's charming diction lin- 
gers in the memory — almost in the ear. I have always 
remembered a certain admirable characterisation of Doc- 
tor Johnson, in the account of the writer's visit to Lich- 
field — and I will preface it by a paragraph almost as good, 
commemorating the charms of the hotel in that interesting 
town. 

"At any rate, I had the great, dull, dingy, and dreary cof- 
fee-room, with its heavy old mahogany chairs and tables, 
all to myself, and not a soul to exchange a word with except 



VI.] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 151 

the waiter, who, like most of his class in England, had evi- 
dently left his conversational abilities uncultivated. No 
former practice of solitary living, nor habits of reticence, 
nor well-tested self-dependence for occupation of mind and 
amusement, can quite avail, as I now proved, to dissipate the 
ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room under such cir- 
cumstances as these, with no book at hand save the county 
directory, nor any newspaper but a torn local journal of five 
days ago. So I buried myself betimes in a huge heap of an- 
cient feathers (there is no other kind of bed in these old inns), 
let my head sink into an unsubstantial pillow, and slept a 
stifled sleep, compounded of the night -troubles of all my 
predecessors in that same unrestful couch. And when I 
awoke, the odour of a bygone century was in my nostrils— 
a faint, elusive smell, of which I never had any conception 
before crossing the Atlantic." 

The whole chapter, entitled "Lichfield and Uttoxeter," 
is a sort of graceful tribute to Samuel Johnson, who cer- 
tainly has nowhere else been more tenderly spoken of. 

"Beyond all question I might have had a wiser friend 
than he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was 
dense : his awful dread of death showed how much muddy 
imperfection was to be cleansed out of him before he could 
be capable of spiritual existence ; he meddled only with the 
surface of life, and never cared to penetrate further than to 
ploughshare depth ; his very sense aqd sagacity w^ere but a 
one-eyed clear-sightedness. I laughed at him, sometimes 
standing beside his knee. And yet, considering that my na- 
tive propensities were towards Fairy Land, and also how 
much yeast is generally mixed up with the mental suste- 
nance of a New Englander, it may not have been altogether 
amiss, in those childish and boyish days, to keep pace with 
this heavy-footed traveller, and feed on the gross diet that 
he carried in his knapsack. It is wholesome food even now ! 
And then, how English ! Many of the latent sympathies 



152 HAWTHOKNE. [chap. 

chat enabled me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and that 
so readily amalgauaated themselves with the American ideas 
that seemed most adverse to them, may have been derived 
from, or fostered and kept alive by, the great English moral- 
ist. Never was a descriptive epithet more nicely appropri- 
ate than that ! Doctor Johnson's morality was as English 
an article as a beef-steak." 

And for mere beauty of expression I cannot forbear 
quoting this passage about the days in a fine English 
summer. 

'' For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. 
As far as your actual experience is concerned, the English 
summer day has positively no beginning and no end. When 
you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is already shin- 
ing through the curtains ; you live through unnumbered 
hours of Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident 
softly etched upon their tranquil lai3se ; and at length you 
become conscious that it is bedtime again, while there is 
still enough daylight in the sky to make the pages of your 
book distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such season, 
hangs down a transparent veil through which the bygone 
day beholds its successor ; or if not quite true of the latitude 
of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern 
parts of the island that To-morrow is born before its Yester- 
day is dead. They exist together in the golden twilight, 
where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the 
ominous infant ; and you, though a mere mortal, may simul- 
taneously touch them both, with one finger of recollection 
and another of prophecy." 

The Note-Books, as I have said, deal chiefly with the 
superficial aspect of English life, and describe the material 
objects with which the author was surrounded. They 
often describe them admirably, and the rural beauty of 
the country has never been more happily expressed. But 



VI.] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 153 

there are inevitably a great many reflections and inci- 
dental judgments, characterisations of people he met, frag- 
ments of psychology and social criticism, and it is here 
that Hawthorne's mixture of subtlety and simplicity, his 
interfusion of genius with what I have ventured to call 
the provincial quality, is most apparent. To an American 
reader this latter quality, which is never grossly manifest- 
ed, but pervades the Journals like a vague natural per- 
fume, an odour of purity and kindness and integrity, must 
always, for a reason that I will touch upon, have a consid- 
erable charm ; and such a reader will accordingly take an 
even greater satisfaction in the Diaries kept during the 
two years Hawthorne spent in Italy ; for in these volumes 
the element I speak of is especially striking. He resigned 
his consulate at Liverpool towards the close of 1857 — 
whether because he was weary of his manner of life there 
and of the place itself, as may well have been, or because 
he wished to anticipate supersession by the new govern- 
ment (Mr. Buchanan's) which was just establishing itself 
at Washington, is not apparent from the slender sources 
of information from which these pages have been com- 
piled. In the month of January of the following year he 
betook himself, with his family, to the Continent, and, as 
promptly as possible, made the best of his way to Rome. 
He spent the remainder of the winter and the spring 
there, and then went to Florence for the summer and au- 
tumn ; after which he returned to Rome and passed a 
second season. His Italian Note-Books are very pleasant 
reading, but they are of less interest than the others ; 
for his contact with the life of the country, its people and 
its manners, was simply that of the ordinary tourist — 
which amounts to saying that it was extremely superficial. 
He appears to have suffered a great deal Of discomfort 



154 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

and depression in Rome, and not to have been, on the 
whole, in the best mood for enjoying the place and its re- 
sources. That he did, at one time and another, enjoy 
these things keenly is proved by his beautiful romance. 
Transformation, which could never have been written by 
a man who had not had many hours of exquisite apprecia- 
tion of the lovely land of Italy. But he took it hard, as 
it were, and suffered himself to be painfully discomposed 
by the usual accidents of Italian life, as foreigners learn to 
know it. His future was again uncertain, and during his 
second winter in Rome he was in danger of losing his 
elder daughter by a malady which he speaks of as a trou- 
ble "that pierced to my very vitals." I may mention, 
with regard to this painful episode, that Franklin Pierce, 
whose presidential days were over, and who, like other ex- 
presidents, was travelling in Europe, caipie to Rome at the 
time, and that the Note -Books contain some singularly 
beautiful and touching allusions to his old friend's grati 
tude for his sympathy, and enjoyment of his society. 
The sentiment of friendship has, on the whole, been so 
much less commemorated in literature than might have 
been expected from the place it is supposed to hold in 
life, that there is always something striking in any frank 
and ardent expression of it. It occupied, in so far as 
Pierce was the object of it, a large place in Hawthorne's 
mind, and it is impossible not to feel the manly tender- 
ness of such lines as these : — 

" I have found him here in Rome, the whole of my early 
friend, and even better than I used to know him ; a heart as 
true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened 
by the experience of life. We hold just the same relation to 
one another as of yore, and we have passed all the turning- 
off places, and may hope to go on together, still the same 



VI.] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 161 

dear friends, as long as we live. I do not love him one whit 
the less for having been President, nor for having done me 
the greatest good in his power ; a fact that speaks eloquent- 
ly in his favour, and perhaps says a little for myself. If 
he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might not have 
borne it so well ; but each did his best for the other, as 
friend for friend." 

The Note-Books are chiefly taken up with descriptions 
of the regular sights and " objects of interest," which we 
often feel to be rather perfunctory, and a little in the style 
of the traditional tourists' diary. They abound in charm- 
ing touches, and every reader of Transformation will re- 
member the delightful colouring of the numerous pages 
in that novel, which are devoted to the pictorial aspects of 
Rome. But we are unable to rid ourselves of the impres- 
sion that Hawthorne was a good deal bored by the im- 
portunity of Italian art, for which his taste, naturally not 
keen, had never been cultivated. Occasionally, indeed, he 
breaks out into explicit sighs and groans, and frankly de- 
clares that he washes his hands of it. Already, in Eng- 
land, he had made the discovery that he could easily feel 
overdosed with such things. "Yesterday," he wrote in 
1856, "I went out at about twelve and visited the British 
Museum ; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crush- 
es a person to see so much at once, and I wandered from 
hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heav- 
en forgive me !) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of 
the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the gran- 
ite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building- 
stones." 

The plastic sense was not strong in Hawthorne ; there 
can be no better proof of it than his curious aversion to 
the representation of the nude in sculpture. This aversion 



156 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

was deep-seated; he constantl)^ returns to it, exclaiming 
upon the incongruity of modern artists making naked fig- 
ures. He apparently quite failed to see that nudity is not 
an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence 
and principle ; and his jealousy of undressed images strikes 
the reader as a strange, vague, long - dormant heritage of 
his straight - laced Puritan ancestry. Whenever he talks 
of statues he makes a great point of the smoothness and 
whiteness of the marble — speaks of the surface of the mar- 
ble as if it were half the beauty of the image ; and when 
he discourses of pictures, one feels that the brightness or 
dinginess of the frame is an essential part of his impres- 
sion of the work — as he, indeed, somewhere distinctly af- 
firms. Like a good American, he took more pleasure in 
the productions of Mr. Thompson and Mr. Brown, Mr. 
Powers and Mr. Hart, American artists who were plying 
their trade in Italy, than in the works which adorned the 
ancient museums of the country. He suffered greatly 
from the cold, and found little charm in the climate, and 
during the weeks of winter that followed his arrival in 
Rome he sat shivering by his fire, and wondering why he 
had come to such a land of misery. Before he left Italy, 
he wrote to his publisher — " I bitterly detest Rome, and 
shall rejoice to bid it farewell forever; and I fully acqui- 
esce in all the mischief and ruin that has happened to it, 
from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the 
very site had been obliterated before I ever saw it." Haw- 
thorne presents himself to the reader of these pages as the 
last of the old-fashioned Americans — and this is the interest 
which I just now said that his compatriots would find in 
his very limitations. I do not mean by this that there are 
not still many of his fellow-countrymen (as there are many 
natives of every Idiid under the sun) who are more suscep- 



vl] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 157 

tible of being irritated than of being soothed by the influ- 
ences of the Eternal City. What I mean is that an Amer- 
ican of equal value with Hawthorne, an American of equal 
genius, imagination, and, as our forefathers said, sensibility, 
would at present inevitably accommodate himself more ea- 
sily to the idiosyncrasies of foreign lands. An American 
as cultivated as Hawthorne, is now almost inevitably more 
cultivated, and, as a matter of course, more Europeanised 
in advance, more cosmopolitan. It is very possible that in 
becoming so he has lost something of his occidental savour, 
the quality which excites the good-will of the American 
reader of our author's Journals for the dislocated, depress- 
ed, even slightly-bewildered diarist. Absolutely the last 
of the earlier race of Americans Hawthorne was, fortunate- 
ly, probably far from being. But I think of him as the 
last specimen of the more primitive type of man of let- 
ters ; and when it comes to measuring what he succeeded 
in being, in his unadulterated form, against what he failed 
of being, the positive side of the image quite extinguishes 
the negative. I must be on my guard, however, against 
incurring the charge of cherishing a national conscious- 
ness as acute as I have ventured to pronounce his own. 

Out of his mingled sensations, his pleasure and his wea- 
riness, his discomforts and his reveries, there sprang anoth- 
er beautiful work. During the summer of 1858, he hired 
a picturesque old villa on the hill of Bellosguardo, near 
Florence, a curious structure with a crenelated tower, 
which, after having in the course of its career suffered 
many vicissitudes and played many parts, now finds its 
most vivid identity in being pointed out to strangers as 
the sometime residence of the celebrated American .ro- 
mancer. Hawthorne took a fancy to the place, as well he 
might, for it is one of the loveliest spots on earth, and the 



158 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

great view that stretched itself before him contains every 
element of beauty. Florence lay at his feet, \\fith her mem- 
ories and treasures ; the olive-coloured hills bloomed around 
him, studded with villas as picturesque as his own ; the 
Apennines, perfect in form and colour, disposed themselves 
opposite ; and in the distance, along its fertile valley, the 
Arno wandered to Pisa and the sea. Soon after coming 
hither he wrote to a friend in a strain of high satisfaction. 

" It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from 
America — a satisfaction that I never really enjoyed as long 
as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to be that the quin- 
tessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was gradual- 
ly filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on the way 
outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own 
countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. 
But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this se- 
cluded villa, I have escaped out of all my old tracks, and am 
really remote. I like my present residence immensely. The 
house stands on a hill, overlooking Florence, and is big 
enough to quarter a regiment, insomuch that each member 
of the family, including servants, has a separate suite of 
apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms 
into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions. 
At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower, haunt- 
ed by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined 
there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burnt at 
the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this 
villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a month ; but I 
mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a romance, which 
I have in my head, ready to be wa-itten out." 

This romance was Transformation, which he wrote out 
during the following winter in Rome, and re-wrote during 
the several months that he spent in England, chiefly at 
Leamington, before returning to America. The Villa Mon- 



Ti.] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 159 

tauto figures, in fact, in this tale as tlie castle of Monte- 
Beni, the patrimonial dwelling of the hero. " I take some 
credit to myself," he wrote to the same friend, on return- 
ing to Rome, " for having sternly shut myself up for an 
hour or two every day, and come to close grips with a 
romance which I have been trying to tear out of my 
mind." And later in the same winter he says — "I shall 
go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be 
very well contented there. ... If I were but a hundred 
times richer than I am, how very comfortable I could be ! 
I consider it a great piece of good fortune that I have h^d 
experience of the discomforts and miseries of Italy, and 
did not go directly home from England. Anything will 
seem like a Paradise after a Roman winter." But he got 
away at last, late in the spring, carrying his novel with 
him, and the book was published, after, as I say, he had 
worked it over, mainly during some weeks that he passed 
at the little watering-place of Redcar, on the Yorkshire 
coast, in February of the following year. It was issued 
primarily in England ; the American edition immediately 
followed. It is an odd fact that in the two countries the 
book came out under different titles. The title that the 
author had bestowed upon it did not satisfy the English 
publishers, who requested him to provide it with another ; 
so that it is only in America that the work bears the name 
of The Marble Faun. Hawthorne's choice of this ap- 
pellation is, by the way, rather singular, for it completely 
fails to characterise the story, the subject of which is the 
living faun, the faun of flesh and blood, the unfortunate 
Donatello. His marble counterpart is mentioned only in 
the opening chapter. On the other hand, Hawthorne com- 
plained that Transformation "gives one the idea of Har- 
lequin in a pantomime." Under either name, however, the 



160 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

book was a great success, and it has probably become the 
most popular of Hawthorne's four novels. It is part of 
the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to 
Rome, and is read by every English-speaking traveller who 
arrives there, who has been there, or who expects to go. 

It has a great deal of beauty, of interest and grace ; but 
it has, to my sense, a ^lighter value than its companions, 
and I am far from regarding it as the masterpiece of the 
author, a position to which we sometimes hear it assigned. 
The subject is admirable, and so are many of the details ; 
but the whole thing is less simple and complete than either 
of the three tales of American life, and Hawthorne for- 
feited a precious advantage in ceasing to tread his native 
soil. Half the virtue of The Scarlet Letter and The House 
of the Seven Gables is in their local quality ; they are im- 
pregnated with the New England air. It is very true that 
Hawthorne had no pretension to portray actualities, and 
to cultivate that literal exactitude which is now the fashion. 
Had this been the case, he would probably have made a 
still graver mistake in transporting the scene of his story 
to a country which he knew only superficially. His tales 
all go on more or less " in the vague," as the French say, 
and of course the vague may as well be placed in Tuscany 
as in Massachusetts. It may also very well be urged in 
Hawthorne's favour here, that in Transformation he has 
attempted to deal with actualities more than he did in 
either of his earlier novels. He has described the streets 
and monuments of Rome with a closeness which forms no 
part of his reference to those of Boston and Salem. But 
for all this he incurs that penalty of seeming factitious and 
unauthoritative, which is always the result of an artist's at- 
tempt to project himself into an atmosphere in which he 
has not a transmitted and inherited property. An English 



ri] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 161 

or a German writer (I put poets aside) may love Italy well 
enough, and know her well enough, to write delightful fic- 
tions about her ; the thing has often been done. But the 
productions in question will, as novels, always have about 
them something second-rate and imperfect. There is in 
Transformation enough beautiful perception of the inter- 
esting character of Rome, enough rich and eloquent ex- 
pression of it,' to save the book, if the book could be saved; 
but the style, what the French call the genre, is an inferior 
one, and the thing remains a charming romance with in- 
trinsic weaknesses. 

Allowing for this, however, some of the finest pages in 
all Hawthorne are to be found in it. The subject, as I 
have said, is a particularly happy one, and there is a great 
deal of interest in the simple combination and opposition 
of the four actors. It is noticeable that, in spite of the 
considerable length of the story, there are no accessory fig- 
ures; Donatello and Miriam, Kenyon and Hilda exclusively 
occupy the scene. This is the more noticeable as the scene 
is very large, and the great Roman background is constant- 
ly presented to us. The relations of these four people are 
full of that moral picturesqueness which Hawthorne was 
always looking for; he found it in perfection in the his- 
tory of Donatello. As I have said, the novel is the most 
popular of his works, and every one will remember the fig- 
ure of the simple, joyous, sensuous young Italian, who is 
not so much a man as a child, and not so much a child as 
a charming, innocent animal, and how he is brought to self- 
knowledge, and to a miserable conscious manhood, by the 
commission of a crime. Donatello is rather vague and im- 
palpable ; he says too little in the book, shows himself too 
little, and falls short, I think, of being a creation. But he 
is enough of a creation to make us enter into the situa- 



162 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

tion, and the whole history of his rise, or fall, whichever 
one chooses to call it — his tasting of the tree of knowl- 
edge, and finding existence complicated with a regret — is 
unfolded with a thousand ingenious and exquisite touches. 
Of course, to make the interest complete, there is a woman 
in the affair; and Hawthorne has done few things more 
beautiful than the picture of the unequal complicity of 
guilt between his immature and dimly-puzzled hero, with 
his clinging, unquestioning, unexacting devotion, and the 
dark, powerful, more widely - seeing feminine nature of 
Miriam. Deeply touching is the representation of the 
manner in which these two essentially different persons — 
the woman intelligent, passionate, acquainted with life, 
and with a tragic element in her own career; the youth 
ignorant, gentle, unworldly, brightly and harmlessly natu- 
ral — are equalised and bound together by their common 
secret, which insulates them, morally, from the ' rest of 
mankind. The character of Hilda has always struck me 
as an admirable invention — one of those things that mark 
the man of genius. It needed a man of genius and of 
Hawthorne's imaginative delicacy, to feel the propriety of 
such a figure as Hilda's, and to perceive the relief it would 
both give and borrow. This pure and somewhat rigid 
New England girl, following the vocation of a copyist of 
pictures in Rorne, unacquainted with evil and untouched 
by impurity, has been accidentally the witness, unknown 
and unsuspected, of the dark deed by which her friends, 
Miriam and Donate) lo, are knit together. This is her rev- 
elation of evil, her loss of perfect innocence. She has 
done no wrong, and yet wrong-doing has become a part of 
her experience, and she carries the weight of her detested 
knowledge upon her heart. She carries it a long time, 
saddened and oppressed by it, till at last she can bear it 



tl] ENGLAND AND ITALY. 163 

no longer. If I have called tbe whole idea of the pres- 
ence and effect of Hilda in the story a trait of genius, the 
purest touch of inspiration is the episode in which the 
poor girl deposits her burden. She has passed the whole 
lonely summer in Rome ; and one day, at the end of it, 
finding herself in St. Peter's, she enters a confessional, 
strenuous daughter of the Puritans as she is, and pours 
out her dark knowledge into the bosom of the church — 
then comes away with her conscience lightened, not a 
whit the less a Puritaii than before. If the book con- 
tained nothing else noteworthy but this admirable scene, 
and the pages describing the murder committed by Dona- 
tello under Miriam's eyes, and the ecstatic wandering, af- 
terwards, of the guilty couple through the " blood-stained 
streets of Rome," it would still deserve to rank high 
among the imaginative productions of our day. 

Like all of Hawthorne's things, it contains a great many 
light threads of symbolism, which shimmer in the texture 
of the tale, but which are apt to break ar|,d remain in our 
fingers if we attempt to handle them. These things are 
part of Hawthorne's very manner — almost, as one might 
say, of his vocabulary ; they belong much more to the sur- 
face of his work than to its stronger interest. The fault 
of Transformation is that the element of the unreal is 
pushed too far, and that the book is neither positively of 
one category nor of another. His " moonshiny romance," 
he calls it in a letter ; and, in truth, the lunar element is 
a little too pervasive. The action wavers between the 
streets of Rome, whose literal features the author perpetu- 
ally sketches, and a vague realm of fancy, in which quite a 
different verisimilitude prevails. This is the trouble with 
Donatello himself. His companions are intended to be 
real — if they fail to be so, it is not for want of intention ; 



164 HAWTHORNE. [chap. vi. 

whereas he is intended to be real or not, as you please. 
He is of a different substance from them ; it is as if a 
painter, in composing a picture, should try to give you an 
impression of one of his figures by a strain of music. The 
idea of the modern faun was a charming one ; but I think 
it a pity that the author should not have made him more 
definitely modern, without reverting so much to his myth- 
ological properties and antecedents, which are very grace- 
fully touched upon, but which belong to the region of pict- 
uresque conceits, much more than to that of real psychol- 
ogy. Among the young Italians of to-day there are still 
plenty of models for such an image as Hawthorne appears 
to have wished to present in the easy and natural Donatel- 
lo. And since I am speaking critically, I may go on to say 
that the art of narration, in Transformation^ seems to me 
more at fault than in the author's other novels. The story 
straggles and wanders, is dropped and taken up again, and 
towards the close lapses into an almost fatal vagueness. 



CHAPTER YII. 

LAST YEARS. 

Of the four last years of Hawthorne's life there is ^ot 
much to tell that I have not already told. He returned 
to America in the summer of 1860, and took up his a'oode 
in the house he had bought at Concord before going to 
Europe, and of which his occupancy had as yet been brief. 
He was to occupy it only four years. I have insisted upon 
the fact of his being an intense American, and of his look- 
ing at all things, during his residence in Europe, from the 
standpoint of that little clod of Western earth which he 
carried about with him as the good Mohammedan carries 
the strip of carpet on which he kneels down to face to- 
wards Mecca. But it does not appear, nevertheless, that 
he found himself treading with any great exhilaration the 
larger section of his native soil upon which, on his return, 
he disembarked. Indeed, the closing part of his life was a 
period of dejection, the more acute that it followed direct- 
ly upon seven years of the happiest opportunities he was 
to have known. And his European residence had been 
brightest at the last; he had broken almost completely 
with those habits of extreme seclusion into which he was 
to relapse on his return to Concord. " You would be 
stricken dumb," he writes from London, shortly before 



166 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

leaving it for the last time, " to see how quietly T accept 
a whole string of invitations, and, what is more, perform 
my engagements vrithout a murmur. . . . The stir of this 
London life, somehow or other," he adds in the same 
letter, " has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel 
better than for months past. This is strange, for if I had 
my choice I should leave undone almost all the things I 
do." " When he found himself once more on the old 
ground," writes Mr. Lathrop, " with the old struggle for 
subsistence staring him in the face again, it is not difficult 
to conceive how a certain degree of depression would fol- 
low." There is, indeed, not a little sadness in the thought 
of Hawthorne's literary gift — light, delicate, exquisite, ca- 
pricious, never too abundant, being charged with the heavy 
burden of the maintenance of a family. We feel that it 
was not intended for such grossness, and that in a world 
ideally constituted he would have enjoyed a liberal pen- 
sion, an assured subsistence, and have been able to produce 
his charming prose only when the fancy took him. 

The brightness of the outlook at home was not made 
greater by the explosion of the Civil War in the spring 
of 1861. These months, and the three years that follow- 
ed them, were not a cheerful time for any persons but 
army-contractors ; but over Hawthorne the war-cloud ap- 
pears to have dropped a permanent shadow. The whole 
affair was a bitter disappointment to him, and a fatal blow 
to that happy faith in the uninterruptedness of American 
prosperity which I have spoken of as the religion of the 
old-fashioned American in general, and the old-fashioned 
Democrat in particular. It was not a propitious time for 
cultivating the Muse ; when history herself is so hard at 
work, fiction has little left to say. To fiction, directly, 
Hawthorne did not address himself; he composed first, 



VII.] LAST YEARS. 167 

chiefly during the year 1862, the chapters of which our 
Our Old Home was afterwards made up. I have said 
that, though this work has less value than his purely imag- 
inative things, the writing is singularly good, and it is well 
to remember, to its greater honour, that it was produced 
at a time when it was painfully hard for a man of Haw- 
thorne's cast of mind to fix his attention. The air was 
full of battle-smoke, and the poet's vision was not easily 
clear. Hawthorne was irritated, too, by the sense of being 
to a certain extent, politically considered, in a false posi- 
tion. A large section of the Democratic party was not in 
good odour at the North; its loyalty was not perceived 
to be of that clear strain which public opinion required. 
To this wing of the party Franklin Pierce had, with rea- 
son or without, the credit of belonging ; and our author 
was conscious of some sharpness of responsibility in de- 
fending the illustrious friend of whom he had already 
made himself the advocate. He defended him manfully, 
without a grain of concession, and described the ex-Presi- 
dent to the public (and to himself), if not as he was, then 
as he ought to be. Our Old Home is dedicated to him, 
and about this dedication there was some little difficulty. 
It was represented to Hawthorne that as General Pierce 
was rather out of fashion, it might injure the success, and, 
in plain terms, the sale of his book. His answer (to his 
publisher) was much to the point. 

" I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to 
withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter. My 
long and intimate personal relations with Pierce render the 
dedication altogether proper, especially as regards this book, 
which would have had no existence without his kindness ; 
and if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his name ought to 
sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old 



168 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of 
pecuniary profit on literary reputation, go back from what I 
have deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I 
were to tear out the dedication I should never look at the vol- 
ume again without remorse and shame. As for the literary 
public, it must accept my book precisely as I think fit to give 
it, or let it alone. Nevertheless, I have no fancy for making 
myself a martyr when it is honourably and conscientiously 
possible to avoid it ; and I always measure out heroism very 
accurately according to the exigencies of the occasion, and 
sliould be the last man in the world to throw away a bit of 
it needlessly. So I have looked over the concluding para- 
graph, and have amended it in such a way that, while doing 
what' I know to be justice to my friend, it contains not a 
word that ought to be objectionable to any set of readers. 
If the public of the North see fit to ostracise me for this, I 
can only say that I would gladly sacrifice a thousand or two 
dollars, rather tlian retain the good-will of such a herd of 
dolts and mean-spirited scoundrels." 

The dedication was published, the book was eminently 
successful, and Hawthorne was not ostracised. The para- 
graph under discussion stands as follows : " Only this let 
me say, that, with the record of your life in my memory, 
and with a sense of your character in my deeper conscious- 
ness, as among the few things that time has left as it found 
them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful for- 
ever to that grand idea of an irrevocable Union which, as 
you once told me, was the earliest that your brave father 
taught you. For other men there may be a choice of 
paths — for you but one ; and it rests among my certainties 
that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, no man's hopes 
or apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more 
deeply heartfelt, or more closely intertwined with his pos- 
sibilities of personal happiness, than those of Franklin 



VII.] LAST YEARS. 169 

Pierce." I know not how well the ex -President liked 
these lines, but the public thought them admirable, for 
they served as a kind of formal profession of faith, on the 
question of the hour, by a loved and honoured writer. 
That some of his friends thought such a profession needed 
is apparent from the numerous editorial ejaculations and 
protests appended to an article describing a visit he had 
just paid to Washington, which Hawthorne contributed to 
the Altantic Monthly for July, 1862, and which, singular- 
ly enough, has not been reprinted. The article has all the 
usual merit of such sketches on Hawthorne's part — the 
merit of delicate, sportive feeling, expressed with consum- 
mate grace — but the editor of the periodical appears to 
have thought that he must give the antidote with the 
poison, and the paper is accompanied with several little 
notes disclaiming all sympathy with the writer's political 
heresies. The heresies strike the reader of to-day as ex- 
tremely mild, and what excites his emotion, rather, is the 
questionable taste of the editorial commentary, with which 
it is strange that Hawthorne should have allowed his arti- 
cle to be encumbered. He had not been an Abolitionist 
before the War, and that he should not pretend to be one 
at the eleventh hour, was, for instance, surely a piece of 
consistency that might have been allowed to pass. "I 
shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown," 
he says, in a page worth quoting, " any further than sym- 
pathy with AVhittier's excellent ballad about him may go; 
nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any 
apophthegm of a sage whose happy lips have uttered a 
hundred golden sentences " — the allusion here, I suppose, 
is to Mr. Emerson — " as from that saying (perhaps falsely 
attributed to so honoured a name), that the death of this 
blood-stained fanatic has * made the Gallows as venerable 
M 8* 



no HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

•as the Cross !' Nobody was ever more justly hanged. 
He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it fairly. He 
himself, I am persuaded (such was his natural integrity), 
would have acknowledged that Virginia had a right to 
take the life which he- had staked and lost; although it 
would have been better for her, in the hour that is fast 
coming, if she could generously have forgotten the crimi- 
nality of his attempt in its enormous folly. On the other 
hand, any common-sensible man, looking at the matter un- 
sentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual satisfac- 
tion in seeing him hanged, if it were only in requital of 
his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities." Now that 
the heat of that great conflict has passed away, this is a 
capital expression of the saner estimate, in the United 
States, of the dauntless and jdeluded old man who pro- 
posed to solve a complex political problem by stirring up 
a servile insurrection. There is much of the same sound 
sense, interfused with light, just appreciable irony, in such 
a passage as the following : 

" I tried to imagine how very disagreeable the presence of 
a Southern army would be in a sober town of Massachusetts ; 
and the thought considerably lessened my wonder at the cold 
and shy regards that are cast upon our troops, the gloom, the 
sullen demeanour, the declared, or scarcely hidden, sympathy 
with rebellion, which are so frequent here. It is a strange 
thing in human life that the greatest errors both of men and 
women often spring from their sweetest and most generous 
qualities ; and so, undoubtedly, thousands of warm-hearted, 
generous, and impulsive persons have joined the Rebels, not 
from any real zeal for the cause, but because, between two 
conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily lay 
nearest the heart. There never existed any other Govern- 
ment against which treason was so easy, and could defend it- 
self by such plausible arguments as against that of the United 



til] last years. 171 

States. The anomaly of two allegiances (of which that of 
the State comes nearest home to a man's feeling, and in- 
cludes the altar and the hearth, while the General Govern- 
ment claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law, and 
has no symbol but a flag) is exceedingly mischievous in this 
point of view ; for it has converted crowds of honest people 
into traitors, who seem to themselves not merely innocent but 
patriotic, and who die for a bad cause with a quiet conscience, 
as if it were the best. In the vast extent of our country — 
too vast by far to be taken into one small human heart — we 
inevitably limit to our own State, or at farthest, to our own 
little section, that sentiment of physical love for the soil 
which renders an Englishman, for example, so intensely sen- 
sitive to the dignity and well-being of his little island, that 
one hostile foot, treading anywhere upon it, would make a 
bruise on each individual breast. If a man loves his own 
State, therefore, and is content to be ruined with her, let us 
shoot him if we can, but allow him an honourable burial in 
the soil he fights for." 

To this paragraph a line of deprecation from the editor 
is attached ; and indeed, from the point of view of a vig- 
orous prosecution of the war, it was doubtless not particu- 
larly pertinent. But it is interesting as an example of the 
way an imaginative man judges current events — trying to 
see the other side as well as his own, to feel what his ad- 
versary feels, and present his view of the case. 

But he had other occupations for his imagination than 
putting himself into the shoes of un appreciative Southern- 
ers, He began at this time two novels, neither of which 
he lived to finish, but both of which were published, as 
fragments, after his death. The shorter of these frag- 
ments, to which he had given the name of The Dolliver 
Romance^ is so very brief that little can be said of it. The 
author strikes, with all his usual sweetness, the opening 



112 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

notes of a story of New England life, and the few pages 
which have been given .to the world contain a charming 
picture of an old man and a child. 

The other rough sketch — it is hardly more — is in a 
manner complete ; it was unfortunately deemed complete 
enough to be brought out in a magazine as a serial novel. 
This was to do it a great wrong, and I do not go too far 
in saying that poor Hawthorne would probably not have 
enjoyed the very bright light that has been projected upon 
this essentially crude piece of work. I am at a loss to 
know how to speak of Septimius Felton, or the Elixir of 
Life ; I have purposely reserved but a small space for 
doing so, for the part of discretion seems to be to pass it 
by lightly. I differ, therefore, widely from the author's 
biographer and son-in-law in thinking it a work of the 
greatest weight and value, offering striking analogies with 
Goethe's Faust ; and still more widely from a critic whom 
Mr. Lathrop quotes, who regards a certain portion of it as 
"one of the very greatest triumphs in all literature." It 
seems to me almost cruel to pitch in this exalted key one's 
estimate of the rough first draught of a tale in regard to 
which the author's premature death operates, virtually, as 
a complete renunciation of pretensions. It is plain to any 
reader that Septimius Felton, as it stands, with its rough- 
ness, its gaps, its mere allusiveness and slightness of treat- 
ment, gives us but a very partial measure of Hawthorne's 
full intention ; and it is equally easy to believe that this 
intention was much finer than anything we find in the 
book. Even if we possessed the novel in its complete 
form, however, I incline to think that we should regard 
it as very much the ,weakest of Hawthorne's productions. 
The idea itself seems a failure, and the best that might 
have come of it would have been very much below The 



VII.] LAST YEARS. 173 

Scarlet Letter or The House of the Seven Gables. The 
appeal to our interest is not felicitously made, and tlie 
fancy of a potion, to assure eternity of existence, being 
made from the flowers which spring from the grave of a 
man whom the distiller of the potion has deprived of life, 
though it might figure with advantage in a short story of 
the pattern of the Twice-Told Tales, appears too slender 
to carry the weight of a novel. Indeed, this whole matter 
of elixirs and potions belongs to the fairy-tale period of 
taste, and the idea of a young man enabling himself to 
live forever by concocting and imbibing a magic draught 
has the misfortune of not appealing to our sense of reality, 
or even to our sympathy. The weakness of Septimius 
Felton is that the reader cannot take the hero seriously — 
a fact of which there can be no better proof than the ele- 
ment of the ridiculous which inevitably mingles itself in 
the scene in which he entertains his lady-love with a pro- 
phetic sketch of his occupations during the successive 
centuries of his earthly immortality. I suppose the an- 
swer to my criticism is, that this is allegorical, symbolic, 
ideal ; but we feel that it symbolises nothing substantial, 
and that the truth — whatever it may be — that it illus- 
trates is as moonshiny, to use Hawthorne's own expres- 
sion, as the allegory itself. Another fault of the story is, 
that a great historical event — the war of the Revolution — 
is introduced in the first few pages, in order to supply the 
hero with a pretext for killing the young man from whose 
grave the flower of immortality is to sprout, and then 
drops out of the narrative altogether, not even forming a 
background to the sequel. It seems to me that Haw- 
thorne should either have invented some other occasion 
for the death of his young officer, or else, having struck 
the note of the great public agitation which overhung hi 5 



>/ 



lU HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

little group of characters, have been careful to sound it 
through the rest of his tale. I do wrong, however, to in- 
sist upon these things, for I fall thereby into the error of 
treating the work as if it had been cast into its ultimate 
form and acknowledged by the author. To avoid this er- 
ror, I shall make no other criticism of details, but content 
myself with saying that the idea and intention of the book 
appear, relatively speaking, feeble, and that, even had it 
been finished, it would have occupied a very different place 
in the public esteem from the writer's masterpieces. 

The year 1864 brought with it for Hawthorne a sense 
of weakness and depression from which he had little relief 
during the four or five months that were left him of life. 
He had his engagement to produce The Dolliver Romance^ 
which had been promised to the subscribers of the Atlan- 
lic Monthly/ (it was the first time he had undertaken to 
publish a work of fiction in monthly parts), but he was 
unable to write, and his consciousness of an unperformed 
task weighed upon him, and did little to dissipate his 
physical inertness. " I have not yet had courage to read 
the Dolliver proof-sheet," he wrote to his publisher in De- 
cember, 1863; "but will set about it soon, though with 
terrible reluctance, such as I never felt before. I am most 
grateful to you," he went on, "for protecting me from 
that visitation of the elephant and his cub. If you hap- 
pen to see Mr. , of L , a young man who was 

here last summer, pray tell him anything your conscience 
will let you, to induce him to spare me another visit, which 
I know he intended. I really am not well, and cannot be 
disturbed by strangers, without more suffering than it is 
worth while to endure." A month later he was obliged 
to ask for a further postponement. " I am not quite up 
to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see 



Til.] LAST YEARS. 175 

any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that 
(like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester 
you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting 
them as full of the old spirit and vigour. That trouble, 
perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a fur- 
ther stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the time, 
lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct 
that I had better keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new 
spirit of vigour if I wait quietly for it; perhaps not." 
The winter passed away, but the "new spirit of vicrour'* 
remained absent ; and at the end of February he wrote to 
Mr. Fields that his novel had simply broken down, and that 
he should never finish it. " I hardly know what to say 
to the public about this abortive romance, though T know 
pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it. 
Yet it is not quite pleasant for an author to announce 
himself, or to be announced, as finally broken down as to 
his literary faculty. ... I cannot finish it unless a great 
change comes over me ; and if I make too great an effort 
to do so, it will be my death ; not that I should care much 
for that, if I could fight the battle through and win it, 
thus ending a life of much smoulder and a scanty fire in 
a blaze of glory. But I should smother myself in mud 
of my own making. ... I am not low-spirited, nor fanci- 
ful, nor freakish, but look what seem to me realities in 
the face, and am ready to take whatever may come. If 
I could but go to England now, I think that the sea-voy- 
age and the ' old Home ' might set me all right." 

But he was not to go to England; he started three 
months later upon a briefer journey, from which he never 
returned. His health was seriously disordered, and in 
April, according to a letter from Mrs. Hawthorne, printed 
by Mr. Fields, he had been " miserably ill." His feebleness 



176 HAWTHORNE. [chap. 

was complete ; he appears to have had no definite malady, 
bat he was, according to the common phrase, failing. Gen- 
eral Pierce proposed to him that they should make a little 
tour together among the mountains of New Hampshire, 
and Hawthorne consented, in the hope of getting some 
profit from the change of air. The Northern New Eng- 
land spring is not the most genial season in the world, 
and this was an indifferent substitute for the resource for 
which his wife had, on his behalf, expressed a wish — a 
visit to " some island in the Gulf Stream." He was not 
to go far ; he only reached a little place called Plymouth, 
one of the stations of approach to the beautiful mountain- 
scenery of New Hampshire, when, on the 18th of May, 
1864, death overtook him. His companion. General 
Pierce, going into his room in the early morning, found 
that he had breathed his last during the night — had pass- 
ed away, tranquilly, comfortably, without a sign or a sound, 
in his sleep. This happened at the hotel of the place — 
a vast white edifice adjacent to the railway -station, and 
entitled the Pemioiwasset House. He was buried at 
Concord, and many of the most distinguished men in the 
country stood by his grave. 

He was a beautiful, natural, original genius, and his life 
had been singularly exempt from worldly preoccupations 
and vulgar efforts. It had been as pure, as simple, as un- 
sophisticated, as his work. He had lived primarily in his 
domestic affections, which were of the tenderest kind ; and 
then — without eagerness, without pretension, but with a 
great deal of quiet devotion — in his charming art. His 
work will remain ; it is too original and exquisite to pass 
away ; among the men of imagination he will always have 
his niche. No one has had just that vision of life, and no 
one has had a literary form that more successfully express- 



vn.] LAST YEARS. ITY 

ed his vision. He was not a moralist, and he was not sim- 
ply a poet. The moralists are weightier, denser, richer, in 
a sense ; the poets are more purely inconclusive and irre- 
sponsible. He combined in a singular degree the spon- 
taneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral 
problems. Man's conscience was his theme, but he saw 
it in the light of a creative fancy which added, out of its 
own substance, an interest, and, I may almost say, an im- 
portance. 



THE END. 



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